The swollen river, the soft ice, the world coming back to itself.
On Tuesday, as was his habit, Hartjes went to the small grocery store on the corner and bought ten apples and three bananas. There were places in the world where one couldn’t get apples year-round or get bananas in the middle of the winter. There were places in the world where you had to wait for the seasons to change, and where seasons didn’t mean just the state of precipitation but also commerce, industry, economy. Apples in February were a sign of good fortune, or that misfortune lurked elsewhere. The cashier grinned and chirped as he weighed the fruit.
That Tuesday made four weeks since Hartjes’s mother had died suddenly. He had not seen her for seven years. Francisco, his stepbrother, had told him over the phone. At the time of her death, his mother had been living in the same narrow town in south Alabama, with its Catholic church, remarkable only because it did not also have a Baptist church. She had lived there all the years of her life, in and among a rotating series of trailers and cars that Hartjes had been spared only because he’d been sent to live with his grandparents. Then his mother married Francisco’s father, also named Francisco, who had a better job and a small house, so Hartjes went to live with them. Hartjes had not remembered giving his mother his number. That’s what he had been thinking when Francisco told him—shouted, really—as if trying to breach the actual raw distance between them, “She’s dead, she’s dead.” The other thing that Hartjes had been thinking of was how much like a man Francisco sounded—it startled Hartjes to hear him that way.
They had last spoken on the night Francisco left for trade school in Georgia. They were in their room, Hartjes lying on the bed, Francisco stuffing clothes into a garbage bag. It was hot, their shirts sticking to their backs. Francisco sat on the edge of the bed, looked over his shoulder at Hartjes, and said, “I’m out of here, kid.” Hartjes shoved at him and said, “Shut up,” because it made him feel good. Francisco stood up, hoisted the black bag over his shoulder. He leaned down and they knocked fists. A friend of his gave him a ride to the bus depot, and then total silence until he called to say that Hartjes’s mother was dead.
“Oh,” Hartjes had said that Tuesday on the phone four weeks before. “Oh, all right.” And then Francisco had hung up, and that was that.
The apples were not for Hartjes. They were for his friend Simon, who lived in the country. They were not for Simon, either, in fact, but for Simon’s goats. The goats were named Helena, Maria, Bertram, Vicky, Dude, and Guy. Helena was a boy goat, the others were girls. Simon had named them before he knew their sexes, after picking them out at two different farms three years or so before, when they were all babies and awkward, barely weaned at all, when it was still possible to mistake a boy goat for a girl and vice versa if you didn’t know what you were doing.
Hartjes cut the apples up for the goats and fed them from the sloping front porch. They had grown accustomed to his way of doing things on these Tuesday visits, and they formed a neat little line and filed up to him one at a time to receive from his palm a chunk of apple. He patted their sides, felt the bristle of their fur, watched the tufts of steam issue from their nostrils. The horizontal bars of their pupils shivered. Their eyes were pale blue. He fed them from a plastic bag, lifting chunk after chunk until they were all gone, and the goats, brushing his palms with their tongues, nipping at his fingertips, gave up on him. Off they wandered to find food elsewhere.
At the kitchen table, Simon sat with his skinny legs crossed, reading the paper. Hartjes came in through the side door (the front door had been bolted for as long as Hartjes had known him). Simon did not look up. He was a tall man, very pale, with thinning white-blond hair. He was just shy of middle age, a little under forty. Hartjes was younger, twenty-five. Two years before, they had met at a party, as people do, and they had fucked three times on three separate occasions, each a little worse, not to any degree that would have made any of the individual incidents awful, but when taken together they represented a doomed enterprise. A year earlier, after the last time they’d had sex, Hartjes said it would be best if they were just friends, and Simon said, “Sure, okay, sure.” But it was clear even then that Simon expected that Hartjes would change his mind, and sometimes he grew irritated that it was taking so long.
“It’s getting warmer,” Hartjes said after he had washed his hands and sat down with a glass of water.
“So it is,” Simon said from behind the paper.
“And the river’s thawed,” Hartjes said.
“So it is.”
“And then I decided to kill myself,” Hartjes said.
“So do it,” Simon said, not letting Hartjes have the satisfaction.
“Some friend.”
“I can get you a rope.”
“Only if you cut me down after,” Hartjes said, putting his head on the table, which smelled like ground pepper and flour.
“Har-dee-har-har.”
Hartjes looked up and saw Simon watching him and beyond Simon into the front hall, where the stairs ran up to the second floor. There were pears in a bowl on the table. Hartjes put his cheek against his forearm and gazed out the window over the sink, into the tall pine trees and the gathering dusk. The kitchen was warm. The goats had come around the house and were trotting around the backyard, Guy and Bertram chasing two of the fatter hens. Simon lifted a cigarette from the ashtray and lit it.
“I just hate the spring,” he said.
“Well, with luck, we’ll all freeze to death long before then,” Simon said, knitting the paper together and apart.
“What are you reading about over there?”
“War, famine, misery, and two for one at the co-op.”
Hartjes felt little kick in his gut. “What’s two for one at the co-op?”
“Apples,” Simon said, lowering the paper so that Hartjes could see his expression.
“They charged me full price!”
“Racists.”
“It’s probably about class,” Hartjes said grimly.
“Oh, it’s about class, is it? I was raised poor, don’t you know. Maybe they’ll give me the two-for-one.”
“I was raised poor. Poor me,” Hartjes said.
“Yeah, but nobody expects me to have been raised poor. But look at me now. I live in a manse.”
“You live in a shotgun house on a county road.”
“A manse.”
“My mother died, did I tell you?”
The paper rustled, lowered. Their eyes met. Simon’s expression narrowed briefly, and Hartjes could see the momentary flutter of his concentration changing focus. Whatever was in Simon’s mind slackened. Hartjes wondered if it was fleeting pity or something else. Simon raised the paper. Hartjes felt relief to have a barrier between them again.
“Oh, well, sucks for you, pal.”
Hartjes felt a nudge on his thigh from Simon’s foot, and he reached under the table and caught it. He ran his thumb down the instep, dug his fingers there, where a foot was tender and vulnerable, and Simon let out a low groan that turned, suddenly, into a startled cry.
“Serves you right,” Hartjes said a little more pointedly than he meant, but then, to make up for his roughness, he stroked Simon’s foot, passing his palm back and forth along its length, up to the ankle and then down, pressing with his palms to get at the stiffness in the sole. Simon leaned back in his chair and let Hartjes work on his feet. The kitchen was quiet except for the crackle and snap in the wood-burning stove and sometimes the sound of Simon’s bones popping. Hartjes felt own his body loosening up, could feel himself growing closer to Simon the longer he touched him. The opening of Simon’s shirt, the blue flannel unbuttoned, sagged like the tongue of some loyal animal and revealed the smooth, pale white of his throat and chest. Hartjes wanted to want him, the same way he wanted to see the rise and swell of Simon’s chest, the firm clench of his stomach, and to feel hot all over with need and the slick, gathering wet that sluiced the glide into desire. He wanted it all, yet what he felt, what he really felt in the seat of his body, where his soul nestled and hummed, was the companionable happiness that came with friendship. But he could see hunger in Simon’s eyes, hunger and other things, other shapes of feelings that he wanted to ask Simon about but couldn’t bring himself to. Simon put his hand to his own throat and worked the shirt open more, ran his hand up his neck and to his mouth and then back down through the shirt, popping the buttons open so that his white undershirt showed, and then lower into the front of his pants, like he was searching for loose change. But Hartjes just kept at his feet, his thumb between the two toes, clean and white, and his fingers on the heel, making the foot arch, bend until he could feel the tendons stretching. He sank lower in his chair, spread his thighs, and let that brace him. Simon groaned and grunted and sometimes lifted his hips or shivered as if he were cold. Hartjes gripped Simon’s ankle and held it as tight as he could. And then he let go, and Simon, having slid low in his chair, seemed to surface in himself, his eyes glossy, his breath ragged. It had been enough for him to watch Simon abandon himself. It had been enough to cause it, to see it, to be a part of Simon’s desire, so that even if Hartjes could not bring himself to want it, he could at least enjoy the sight of Simon wanting, needing. He was hard. They both were hard, but what was to be done for it? Let it rest, he thought. A thick blue vein throbbed at the base of Simon’s throat, pulsed when Simon swallowed. His chest was red. His throat was red. He was watching Hartjes, and Hartjes watched the animal part of Simon submerge itself into the icy pool of higher brain function.
“It’s always like this,” Simon said a moment or two later.
“It’s not,” Hartjes said. “It’s not like anything.”
“What is it with you? Why is it always so hot and cold?”
“It’s not anything, Simon. It’s not.”
“Okay, champ.” Simon got up from the table. He buttoned his shirt. Blue light from the window fell across him. It was the part of the day when even the ugliest things were beautiful. “Are you staying for dinner?”
“I’d like to.”
“All right.”
“Do you need help?”
“Do you need help, he asks,” Simon said, shaking his head. He had buttoned his shirt and stuffed it into the front of his pants. He brushed the back of his hand across his mouth and sniffed hard. “No, it’s just stew from last night.”
“I wasn’t joking earlier, you know, about my mom. It seemed like you thought I was joking.”
Simon lifted a heavy red pot from the fridge and set it on the stove. He put his palms against his lower back and stretched. He pressed the knuckles of his left toes against the floor. “I didn’t think you were joking,” he said after a moment.
“Well, all right, then.”
“Don’t get mad about it. What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. What’s to say?”
“If you have something you want me to say, then I’d like to hear it.”
“Forget it.”
“No, not forget it. Say it. Say words, Hartjes. Words.”
Hartjes leaned back. The fire on the stove spat as moisture from the skin of the pot evaporated or dropped into the flame. The blue veil of night had passed and now it was dim in the kitchen, so that the only light was from the stove. Simon reached for the switch on the other side of the doorway.
“No, it’s fine.”
“I don’t know what people say in moments like this—you didn’t love her, did you?”
“No, I guess not, probably not,” he said.
When Hartjes was ten, he’d gotten himself stung by seven wasps at his aunt Lora Anne’s house, and his mother had said, “That’s what faggots get.” It was a story he had learned to tell white people with some degree of exaggerated gravity, and it had paid for his college, because white people had a vast hunger for the calamities of others.
When he told the story at parties, he took his time: His mother and the other adults had been reading and rereading with increasing levels of despair and also hysteria a suicide note found in the hand of Lora Anne’s youngest son, an aspiring rapper and barber, who had shot himself once through the temple on the banks of the creek because he had been diagnosed with, among other rumored things, pancreatic cancer. Lora Anne was a preacher and drove miles upon miles to preach in nondenominational churches. Hartjes and his eleven cousins had been running around the rusty swing set, trying to coax it back into life, when out the wasps had come, and Hartjes, being slower and clumsier, had tripped and made himself an easy target. They’d stung him and he’d gone screaming into the house, and his mother had said it.
“Then what am I supposed to say? I’m sorry?” Simon asked.
“I just didn’t want you thinking I had lied about it, that’s all. I didn’t want you thinking it was a joke or that I’d made it up just to have something to say. I just wanted you to know that. I wasn’t complaining.” Hartjes drank the water he had been nursing, which was lukewarm now and tasted faintly of metal from the pipes.
Simon hummed. He stirred the stew, which smelled to Hartjes like tomatoes and pepper, with the musky scent of venison. When Hartjes let his chair rock back and forth, balancing himself with the wide set of his feet, it sounded like a swinging door. His hunger felt distant, like it belonged to someone else.
Sweat collected against his forehead, and he wiped at it. The skin at the lower part of his spine was hot and dry. His eyes were stinging. Near the back door, Simon had put three red clay pots on a low bench. The bench had been a pew at Saint Anne Lutheran Church before the church had burned to the ground. Simon used to go out to the blackened ruins to sit in what was left of its pews and gaze out into the valley of pine and cedar and oak trees, the wind on his face and the scent of soot rising all around him. When he was out there, he told Hartjes as they twisted the pews from the foundations into which they had been bolted, searching for one that wouldn’t crumble to ash, when he was out there, it seemed that the whole world went away, all his problems, all his needs—hunger, pain, money, viral load, all of it. Hartjes could understand that. He could understand how a person could get to needing that, stillness in the world. Simon and Hartjes had rescued the pews and scraped them down to their bones, and then they’d polished, coated, and lacquered them until they were smooth with a rich stain. All that work to use them for indoor plants: large, leafy green things with heads like that of a Saint Bernard or a Newfoundland, lolling in the winter light.
Simon and Hartjes ate their stew on the porch in the cold. Simon turned his portable space heater on its back under the slats of the bench, and the two of them sat with their legs tucked under them, though for Hartjes it was a struggle because he was thick through the haunch and some fifteen or twenty pounds heavier than Simon. Night had fallen by then, and the world was a smooth black sheet. Across the road and across the fields, they could make out the yellow-orange light in a house as narrow as Simon’s. The yard was patchy with snow and ice. The goats had bedded down in their pen in the back, though sometimes their calls lifted up and swept overhead like the softening static at the start of a radio station.
More distantly, Hartjes could hear whining, baying, and felt a flurry of homesickness. When he had lived with his grandparents during the murky middle years of his childhood, he had raised three dogs into brilliant hunters, Gristle, Bone, and Marrow. He had run his hand along their spines, teaching them to be still, to be quiet, to wait. He’d felt their hearts beating, slowing, growing inured to the length of time it took for the world to show its belly. They had been mutts when he found them, three butterscotch pups clinging to life, drenched in ants and beetles. But he’d rinsed them clean and loved on them the way nobody had loved on him. He had taught them to hunt, to be keen and swift as they stalked and waited. He’d taught them to fetch at first with dolls and dummies filled with clay and rocks, realistic weights, and later they’d brought him the real thing, ducks wet and warm with blood. Pheasant. Squirrel. Whatever Hartjes trained his rifle on, they pinned and cornered and stalled. They could tree anything, the three of them, even turkeys, frothing with rage, bodies humming, ready to take flight. But the dogs calling in the distance were not his dogs. The dogs baying in the distance slept inside and ran from their shadows. Gristle, Bone, and Marrow would have eaten those dogs alive, because Hartjes had loved them enough to teach them how to fight, how to maim, how to kill, and the people here, in this place, let their dogs sleep in their beds, as though that were love.
They ate slowly because the venison was hot. Hartjes dug his spoon into the soft potatoes and the carrots. A light dangled overhead, and in the surface of the broth he saw their shadowed, inverted selves. Hartjes had on his flannel coat, and Simon had wrapped himself in a green wool blanket. The heater, on its lowest setting, droned like cicadas. There was just enough heat to remind them how cold it was. Simon’s spoon clacked against the side of his bowl. He coughed into his shoulder. Hartjes studied the flaking skin along his jaw, the rosettes of sores spotting his cheeks and the primitive cliff of his forehead.
“Do you ever get lonely out here?”
“You ask that every time.”
“Because you never answer,” Hartjes said.
“Sometimes. It’s not so bad.”
“You ever think about moving back to town? You could probably get an okay amount for this place.”
“Yeah, I think about it.”
“But you won’t.”
“No, probably won’t. I came out here to get away from all that, I guess.”
“It’s not exactly a metropolis you’re escaping,” Hartjes said.
“It’s not about the size of the place. It’s about . . . hell, I don’t know. I guess it’s about living on your own terms. Setting a limit for yourself. Being about something. In your own way.”
“In my own way,” Hartjes said, singing the words to the melody of some song from years before, on country radio, that had at that very moment surfaced in his memory.
“Do you ever get lonely?”
“Sure, I get lonely,” Hartjes said, rocking them a little on the bench, his shoes scraping across the grit on the porch. “I get mighty lonely.”
Simon nodded but didn’t say anything. They ate quietly. The venison had cooled a little. Simon got up to bring them beers. It was the first one of the evening for them. They popped the tabs and toasted one another, toasted their loneliness.
“So, your mother died,” Simon said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, I don’t suppose I do.”
“People die.”
“Such are the facts.”
“How did she die?”
“Francisco didn’t say.”
“Francisco. It’s a family affair.”
“Please don’t start.”
“I didn’t know you were talking to Francisco.”
“I’m not.”
“So no teary reunion between brothers after all these years.”
“I guess we’re all cried out,” Hartjes said. The beer was cheap and weak. Hartjes burped and wiped the foam from his lips. He saw, briefly, the outline of Francisco’s face: the somber brown eyes, the patchy beard, the flat, crooked nose, and the chipped tooth from the time they’d gone rolling down the hill, punching and kicking at each other. They were all cried out. Francisco had caught his face on the edge of a large rock, had almost sliced his lip right from his mouth. He had blamed Hartjes. It had been his fault. That’s true. It had been his fault for provoking Francisco, calling him Franny, delighting in the rage that had swelled his boy chest and sent him hurtling at Hartjes. Franny, Franny, Franny. Hartjes had been the younger one, but taller, so people mistook him for the older brother.
“Family isn’t everything,” Simon said.
“No, it isn’t,” Hartjes said. “Do you want another beer?”
“It’s my fridge,” Simon said. “You can’t offer me something that’s not yours.”
“Oh, and I guess you’re the one who bought it? I guess you’re the one who always buys it and stocks it so you don’t run out.”
“I didn’t ask for it, Hartjes.”
“You never ask for anything except what you know I won’t give,” Hartjes said, but he regretted it a little. He saw Simon flinch and then go still. Simon drew the blanket around himself.
“Well, all right,” he said.
“I’ll get that beer,” Hartjes said. Simon was looking at the trees.
Hartjes stooped low in the kitchen and tore two cans from the plastic yoke. He held them in his palm, which was wide and paler than the rest of him. He counted the containers of food, the vegetables, the soups, the stock, the meat tumescent in its plastic wrap. He saw the jars of moonshine, the bottle of wine from two weeks earlier with a plastic stopper jammed into its neck, and gelatinous cubes of gristle and fat, which Simon used for broth and for taste.
The light was off, but they had left a candle going on the table. He turned in Simon’s kitchen and looked back through the house into the living room, where the furniture slept like guests and where the windows were filled with the soft white glow of distant stars. He hovered near the window by the stairs and pressed his face into the bristling curtain, inhaled its dust, and closed his eyes. There had been a time when Hartjes hated the dark. No, it wasn’t hatred. It was fear—he was scared both of what he couldn’t see and what might see him. He touched his lips to the cold glass of the window and summoned the clearest image of his mother he could bear to hold in his mind, as though he were laying her within the glass itself, passing her off to the house like a benediction.
The thing that he never told anyone at any of the parties in college or elsewhere, the thing he had told Simon on the third and final night they’d slept together, was that his mother had been furious at him because, two days before that afternoon at his aunt’s house, she had caught him on top of Francisco in the church bathroom. He’d had his hands around Francisco’s throat, and Francisco had been kicking silently under him. It had started because Francisco had let him into the bathroom, said, “Hey, come in, pee, it’s fine,” and it was the first brotherly thing Francisco had said to him since they’d been living together. It made Hartjes feel wanted. So, with them pissing into the toilet, hitting one another with their spray, Hartjes said to Francisco, Do you want to play Mercy Me? And Francisco, shaking off and tucking back into his slacks, had shaken his head, and Hartjes said, Me first. Then he wrapped his hands around Francisco’s neck, and Francisco squirmed and said, You didn’t wash your hands, and Hartjes said, Shut up. Mercy Me was a simple game, a stupid game, one they’d all played in the woods and in the sheds on the farm, putting their hands around each other’s throats and squeezing slowly at first: softly, then firm, digging into the soft fuzz at the nape of the neck, until the other boy beat your chest, until his face went red and he opened his mouth and gasped, Mercy, mercy me. Have mercy on me. In the bathroom, the spaces between his fingers still sticky with piss, he squeezed Francisco’s throat gently, the same way he first held Gristle, Marrow, and Bone when they were first born and he sensed that he could, very easily, destroy them. It was love to choose otherwise.
In Simon’s bed, telling the story, he’d tried to be jokey—“You should have seen her face”—but there was nothing funny in it. She had flushed with anger, with fear, and she’d pushed Hartjes to the side. He’d clipped his head on the edge of the window. She pulled Francisco, coughing, wheezing, up from the floor and beat his back hard and fast. She’d said, “I love you, are you okay, I love you.” She had wrapped her arms around Francisco while Hartjes sat there holding his head. He had felt like he was full of wet sand. And Simon had rolled on top of him and kissed him and said, “Are you still waiting for her to turn to you, too? To say she loved you? You gotta let this go, man. It’s done.”
Hartjes had wanted to say that if it was easy to get over your mother discarding you, then the whole world would be a different and stranger place. That hurt had a weight to it, a gravity as essential as the Earth’s, and it was a kind of natural law that kept them all doing as they should. But he just kissed Simon’s throat.
But now she was dead.
It was a different thing to speak ill of the dead.
In his family, one did not speak the name of the dead after they had been buried. It was a summons. A beckoning. And who knew what the dead might take with them when they left again. When his grandfather had died, they had burned not only his possessions but almost everything he’d ever touched, all of it that could be burned. What made no sense to burn—the tools, the guns, the tractors, the car—they wiped and cleaned. They laid it all out on the benches and worktables in the back and scrubbed everything down with alcohol and bleach, with oil and polish, wiped and wiped as if that might erase history, time, possession. His family took down all his grandfather’s pictures, stored them away.
When a person died, anything at all might be a way back, an anchor, a reason for fitful sleep. His grandmother had kept something, her wedding ring, and she woke every night for a month with his grandfather’s ghostly image standing beside her bed. And finally, as she took the ring off and slipped it into a sock and buried it in the yard, she said that, looking at him, at that sad look on his face, that expectant look, she knew that she had to either join him or let him go.
On the porch he gave Simon his beer, but he wouldn’t let go when Simon tried to pull it loose from his hand. Simon snatched again, and Hartjes held on tighter until he saw Simon bare his teeth, the slick, pointed canines. His eyes narrowed. The vein at the base of his neck bulged. His skinny fingers were strong. The beer sloshed. Hartjes let him have it.
“Fucker,” Simon said under his breath. Hartjes sat roughly on the bench. It rattled under his weight.
“Work tomorrow,” Hartjes said.
“He’s getting back on his barge,” Simon said, drinking.
“Call me Huck Finn,” Hartjes said.
“You ever get sick of it?”
“No,” Hartjes said. He worked construction down on the river, where they were putting up a new footbridge. His own job involved the careful freighting of materials onto the platform where the crane rested on the water. There were times when he thought he’d get sick from the motion of the barge, the constant shifting underfoot. There were times when his hands hurt from lifting and pushing and turning, tightening the straps until they wouldn’t give, tightening them until it seemed impossible that anyone would ever be able to set them loose again. Days when his back ached and his stomach hurt and his hair was peppered with grit, when his eyes burned, and his nose burned from the stench of oil and of the river, which was dying a slow, choked death via a series of minor diversions. But then, on bright winter days, he’d look up and see the geese tracking across the sky, moving up there free as air, and he’d think that there was something beautiful left in the world. And he could go on like that, as long as there was something beautiful to look at. He sweated through his coveralls, through his flannel, into the white mud that caked his gloves and his sleeves. And he thought about those geese, thought about the ice breaking up and the slow green-black water that moved beneath it.
“Flowing and flown,” he said under his breath.
“You went to Cornell,” Simon said. “You went to Cornell to work construction on a river.”
“I went to Cornell to get out of Alabama,” he said with no irony, with no regret.
“All that trouble, for nothing,” Simon said.
“I like it,” Hartjes said. “It’s only nothing if you expect something better. I never wanted anything.”
“Except to get out.”
“And get out I did,” Hartjes said. He nudged the knob of the heater, and more dry heat radiated under them. “Do you know those people?”
The light of the house across the fields had deepened into a marigold color. Simon squinted.
“Big fields make for good neighbors,” Simon said, biting at his thumbnail.
“There were houses like this in my town,” Hartjes said. “Little specks out on the dirt roads.”
“Rural America. The heartland.”
“Dixie,” Hartjes said with a low growl.
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” Simon sang.
“Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,” Hartjes said, and Simon’s chest rattled. “I, a Catholic, go to the trouble of learning your Protestant hymns and this is what I get.”
“Protestant hymns. Okay, Martin Luther.”
“Was that racial?” Hartjes asked, extending the joke perhaps a note too far, but Simon doubled over and howled between his knees. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but deceitful are the kisses of an enemy.”
“Kisses? Are we kissing now?” Simon leaned over and kissed Hartjes on the mouth. His breath was hot and frothy from the beer. His eyes were glazed. Hartjes had not kissed anyone in more than a month, and the suddenness of it made him dizzy. He didn’t know what to say, so he put his hand on Simon’s knee, and Simon kissed him again.
“Simon,” Hartjes said.
“It’s not so bad. You can’t catch it from kissing.” Simon’s lips were dry. His eyes were hazy and blue. Hartjes held his hand.
“I’m not stupid. I know that.”
“Then kiss me. Be merciful. Be good to me. Kind to me. Kiss me.”
“Simon says kiss me,” Hartjes said, putting their foreheads together. He peeled some of the wool from the blanket.
“You are a cruel person, Hartjes.”
Hartjes kissed him. It was quick, there and gone.
“Are you satisfied?”
“You’re cruel,” he said, and Hartjes kissed him, and he said it again each time until their lips were warm and close and puffed from kissing.
“I’m getting cold,” Hartjes said.
“It’s warm inside.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It isn’t. Come in and find out.”
“Simon—you know I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I have work in the morning.”
“Come inside. Just for a little while. Come inside.”
Simon stood up. He stumbled a little and then stooped, the blanket still around him. He flicked off the heater. And he stuck his hand out. He would not be denied. Hartjes could see that. There was determination cut deep in the grooves of his face. He looked handsome again. The light from the moon was in the snow, and the world was impossibly bright.
“Okay,” Hartjes said. “Just a minute.”
They got up and went along the porch around the house. Hartjes shuffled near the doorway. Simon jerked his head impatiently. Hartjes crossed the doorway and stepped into the kitchen. His steps were heavy. They climbed the stairs, and with each footfall Hartjes could feel his body contracting. He felt hot and damp under his arms. He wiped at his brow with his sleeve. The pictures on the wall didn’t belong to Simon. They had come with the place, and Simon left them up because he said he liked them and they had lived here longer than he had and what right did he have to usurp them. Spiderwebs billowed against the wall. The staircase felt dusty and grim. At the top of the stairs, Simon groped for the light, and Hartjes knew that if he made an excuse right then, right at that very moment, he might get away. He might yet manage to extricate himself. But he did not. Simon found the switch, and the hall was suddenly yellow, like sepia. On the small tables were minor trinkets, crosses and portraits of saints, delicate painted women, martyrs, beads and pearls. A nest of sacraments, antique brushes, and burnished jewelry.
The light in Simon’s room was almost blue with cold. Hartjes dropped his jacket on the floor. He got into the bed and Simon climbed in next to him. Then on top of him. Simon’s hard hands scraped over his chest and stomach, started to go lower. Hartjes reached for them sharply, and in retaliation Simon latched onto his neck. The damp, persistent heat of it. Hartjes closed his eyes. Simon kissed and bit a path upward until Hartjes had no choice but to kiss him back. Hartjes closed his eyes and put his arms around Simon, held him close. He rocked their bodies together, and then he rolled onto Simon and pressed him flat into the mattress. He could give Simon this, he thought. He couldn’t want him back in the same way, but he could give him this. Hartjes kissed him rougher and more deeply, pressed Simon flatter. The bed shook a little. Simon moaned, but when Hartjes wouldn’t let him draw any fresh breath, he bucked. Hartjes held on, his own breath sour and hot now, their mouths fighting. Hartjes pushed at Simon, felt the terrible weakness of his limbs.
At first Simon punched at his chest. He fought. He twisted. He kicked. He tried to get out from under Hartjes, but Hartjes wouldn’t let him. Hartjes ran the seam of his palm along Simon’s throat, felt the muscle of it jump and squirm like the backs of his dogs. No fur. Just the slippery animal surface, the gooseflesh, the chilled skin waiting. Hartjes squeezed, felt the muscle contract. Simon wheezed, gave a bronchial cough. Simon stared up at him. Hartjes could feel Simon getting hard and then going soft. He could feel the wet warmth cooling against his stomach. He could feel Simon twisting and writhing and trying to scrape something out of this. But he held on. The tiny vessels in Simon’s eyes thickened. The circles of his pupils shrank, opened, shivered in the blue of his irises. Simon turned red and his cheeks swelled like he was holding his breath.
Hartjes tracked back through the hall and down the stairs and into the living room, where the light was on. Hartjes stumbled on the foot of the stairs. The living room was the same sepia shade as the upstairs, had the same blue-and-gold wallpaper that had faded with time. The light had been off. He and Simon had climbed the stairs in darkness.
It was a trick being played on him. He gripped at his head and beat the hard fat of his palms against his skull. He should never have said anything about his mother. He should never have gone up those stairs. It all felt so impossible—that his mother was dead, that he’d hurt Simon, thinking he could give him what he wanted, that he stood now under a light that he had seen Simon turn off. None of it made sense. But that was a kind of sense, too.
Hartjes turned in a slow circle.
Hartjes held his breath.
Hartjes waited.
The quiet of the house droned. It gave no answers. The light overhead did not flicker. It did not waver. It was steadfast. The faucet dripped. The candle had burned itself out. Their bowls were on the counter. Everything was as it should have been.
Upstairs, there was a thud like footsteps.
Hartjes went to the front door and pulled and pulled at the bolt. It would not budge. He pulled harder. It would not budge. The door itself was so thin and shabby that Hartjes felt he could have jerked it right off the hinges, but he didn’t. He kept at the bolt, pulling on it, but the bolt just rattled and spun, and when Hartjes pulled on the knob, it twisted uselessly.
There was quiet upstairs.
Hartjes got the door open. The cold was on him right away. He had left his coat upstairs. At his car, he looked back toward the house. Two lights, the first floor and the second, burned like one yellow column.
In Simon’s window, a shadow passed back and forth as if pacing. In the cold, Hartjes watched the shadow glide across the curtain like the second hand of a clock, the persistent beat of its passage. Then both lights went out, and it was impossible to tell the shadow from the rest of the house. And overhead, the tips of the trees brushed the night sky like the wingbeats of a thousand starlings.