THE RUNNEL-SCORED GRAVEL drive had never been refreshed or black-topped. Barry and another boy were hired to spread the lunar gray gravel as evenly as possible, pulling the largest rocks to the edges to form a rough curb. Barry was issued a real antique of a rake. The haft bulged and tapered slightly in a quaint effort at ergonomics. The stony polish of the old wood started raising blisters at once.
The Paul family lived exactly where a concrete sidewalk ended. To the east were more aging suburban bungalows like theirs, neat but almost abject in their mid-century modesty. Jane Brzostovsky lived in one several blocks closer to Lawrence Academy and Princeton but still in that fancy zip code’s catchment for lower income households. To the west, after the sidewalk came to an abrupt weedy end in front of the Paul house, a fragment of countryside remained, including this Victorian farmhouse with its gray gravel drive. The new owner was standing with Barry’s mother, Jeanette, in front of her place. She wore a resting expression of unpleasantness as he explained how car tires kicked up the dust of the drive, leaving the vehicles, including his Jaguar, coated in powder. He was going to have to go with asphalt in the end, though he hoped that wouldn’t look too citified. Jeanette eyed Barry and the other boy intently, not out of interest but to discourage the boring neighbor.
Barry raked. He rewrapped his blisters with his T-shirt and kept raking. The other boy, a skateboarding friend, also shirtless, was shirking. He had Barry stop to observe a cute trick he liked to perform. His flat belly appeared organless, but he was able to distend it until it looked like he was eight months pregnant. He did this several times, making a great descending wave of his gut. The driveway owner turned to Jeanette with an indulgent smile. She ignored him.
The gritty noise the two boys were making might have been the quintessential sound of labor. Barry’s pants and the lawn next to the drive whitened like the neighbor’s Jaguar under groggy plumes of dust raised by the rakes. These low clouds floated toward the Paul house. Jeanette waved a hand in front of her face though they came nowhere near her. She gave the neighbor an annoyed up-and-down.
From the corner of his eye, Barry saw her turn when his father, Lynn, came out of the house. The screen door closed behind him with a wiry noise. He raised his foot as if it had been sticking to the welcome mat and toppled off the brick front stoop sprawling on all fours on the lawn. The neighbor had lurched toward him as if to help but stopped because Jeanette had failed to make the slightest move. She turned back to the raking boys.
Lynn was slow to gather his wits, unsteady about standing up. When he finally did, he massaged his sore elbows. He squinted at his son and the other boy as he moved toward them.
Barry guessed Lynn was drunk from the sticky-stepping way he pretended to concentrate on them. Jeanette and the neighbor followed him with, respectively, a narrow gaze and a frown. Eyelids half-closed, Lynn came up to Barry and the other boy. “Hard at work!” he whispered. “Here you are, hard at work.”
Lynn noticed grass stains on the knees of his pants. He picked at the cloth and shook it slightly. “Now,” he said. “Now. What?” He winced, looking up. “Oh, I mean the...” He chucked his head toward the weeds and Queen Anne’s lace where the sidewalk ended. It seemed too bright for him outside. “No, we got a—that’s prime territory for ticks—you got to police yourself everywhere after you walk in the woods or the—” He shook a hand, a languid rag, at the Queen Anne’s lace. “Or the scrub. Especially your pubes. It’s—” His forefinger tapped under one eye to indicate a careful examination for ticks.
Barry made a know-nothing face.
“Oh, yeah,” said the flat-bellied boy. “We had a couple of people around here who got it. Uh, last year. Lyme disease.”
Barry kept standing impassively. The other boy politely searched his forearms for ticks.
“You remember, Barry. You got to be careful, man. Those buggers are tiny. Those ticks.” Lynn half-sneezed and scratched at the inside of one nostril with his thumbnail, prompting another ticklish snort.
“Who got sick?’ Barry asked. Over by his own house his mother was leaning in toward the dull neighbor to whisper something. She produced a tart laugh and reentered her house, hips swaying, head shaking. The neighbor started walking toward them reluctantly.
Lynn waved his hand in the general direction of the Atlantic. “Some people living back there. A couple of women with dogs.”
Barry began, “I don’t want to sound like recalcitrant or anything, Lynn—” He gave the vocabulary word paternal emphasis.
Lynn cut him off, “Doesn’t matter if you don’t remember them. Just so you check your fucking pubes for ticks.” The neighbor hovered behind Lynn.
“OK, we’ll check. We’ll check.” Barry held a palm up to his father.
Lynn stared at the boy’s blistered palm. His eyelids were half-shut again. “What happened?” he asked softly, not really asking.
“What happened to me?”
“Yeah, look.” He pointed at Barry’s palm. The blister had broken. A wrinkled flap of skin, awash in clear ichor, stuck to the raw wound in the center of Barry’s palm.
Barry shrugged.
“Did you fall? I fell?” Lynn whispered. It seemed he was trying to remember. He looked down at his knees.
“No, it just happened,” Barry said. “I didn’t fall. I guess it’s more like stigmata.”
“Hey, Lynn,” the neighbor finally touched Lynn’s shoulder, causing the disoriented man to flinch.
“Look what happened.” Lynn tried grabbing Barry’s injured hand. He missed. “You got hurt, baby,” he whispered.
“Maybe I should wash it?”
“Yeah, go on in and wash,” the neighbor suggested. “You guys can get back to it later. Or some other time. I’ll give you an hour on the clock for today.”
By evening a few fireflies started to pulse in the shadows, though the treetops were golden still and the sky luminous blue. Barry practiced bike riding with no hands. He passed Jane Brzostovsky sitting on her front step holding a glass of whiskey. Teacher student meetings weren’t uncommon in fine weather. Barry lived outdoors, and Jane enjoyed subtly blasting teacher etiquette by appearing in public with alcohol or sunbathing. She wondered whether seeing Barry so often as a real person, as a neighborhood kid, hadn’t helped her crush along at first. But this time she stiffened and set her glass by her hip.
Since Barry had had good luck being nursed in Bel-Mar, he pulled up and showed her his blistered palms. He’d washed them at the neighbor’s, but they were dirty again from the bike’s black foam handlebars, which he kept having to grab when the bike wobbled. He was oblivious to the possibility of awkwardness between them. Jane seemed confused. “Do you want me to do something, Barry? You are a mess,” she admitted, nodding at his white-powdered pant legs. “Here. Come in for a minute,” she ordered. In the bathroom she splashed hydrogen peroxide on his palms. She handed him a wad of toilet paper and left him. She topped off her drink in the dining room.
“Your parents know what you’re up to?” Jane demanded rather harshly. The whiskey bottle set off a glockenspiel riff when she replaced it among several others.
“They’re in the middle of a big standoff. I’ll probably have to fix a French bread pizza later.”
“What’s the problem with them?”
“I think they hate each other,” Barry said equably. “He’s an alcoholic,” he added with a smile at Jane’s whiskey.
Jane rounded on him. After an odd gulp of a pause, she said, “Listen. I don’t know if I want you tracking dirt all over the house. Let me run those through the wash. It’ll be twenty minutes.”
She washed his pants. She tossed him a thin blanket to wrap around him like a sarong. Barry smiled at how her body jerked stiffly as she crammed the pants in the washer. His own hands had a tremor until he bunched the blanket at his waist.
“OK. Off you go and lie down while these finish. On the couch in there, I mean,” she ordered. He obeyed. She sat in the kitchen by herself, glaring at the telephone. Her heart was pounding. Slight stabbing pains came out of nowhere in her thigh and an ankle. Sharp as they were, the pains were also teasing, messages from her poltergeist mind. Silent as a ghost, she got up and stood behind the half-open door to the dusk-charged living room. She crossed her arms. At length she forefingered the door ajar. She sidled into the room and stood on the far side of the threshold for a long time.
“I’m not asleep, you know.” Barry said. “I’m not going to. It’s way too early. Before dinner even. You didn’t really expect me to go to bed?” Confusion about Jane’s twitchiness in the shadows made him frown, but he acted at his ease, stilling his hands by clasping them behind his head. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Jane sighed a tragic, operatic sigh. “What do you mean What am I doing? I’m standing right here. Waiting for the wash to end.” She pinched the knurled switch of a table lamp. It was loose and ratcheted on—off—on—off—on. She took funereal steps into the room.
She posed a hip on the couch arm, then slipped softly onto the cushion next to Barry’s feet. Trembling but without touching him she slanted sideways, her fingers dragging her long arm along the back of the couch. A few inches, and decades, between them, her shoulders and side were in awful pain, tensed despite the languorous posture. The trembling got worse if she tried to relax her muscles. Her eyes had adjusted to the light, so she closed them.
She squinted at Barry. In the slowest of slow-motion, Jane pinched a corner of the blanket at Barry’s shoulder. Just as slowly, she dragged it off him and kicked it to the floor. “I don’t know,” Barry said. He meant to sound amused, ironic, poised. But the strangled syllables came out tiny. His puppy-large hands joined over his white briefs.
Her squint fluttered as if the luster of his skin were blinding. Flawless and white as a new baseball, his chest, belly, thighs, glared at her. This close, he even had a scent like nothing Jane had ever smelled. He shifted so the front of his briefs was better hidden, shyly turning his buttocks partway toward her looming arm and despairing expression. The white cotton twisted over his hip and the crest of ilium. Her eyes closed again. Despite his wiggling, the hidden part wasn’t so hidden. In an eyelash-barred brightness Jane could see the untimely, expected swelling of the cotton fabric behind his hands. Barry attempted a wisecracking whisper again, “Mmm. I really don’t know.” Mirroring her, he shut his eyes, crumpled them tightly in the way of children. Jane’s hand fell between the couch’s back and his unbreathing torso. On its back, the hand inched under Barry. He seemed unable to move himself until, suddenly lighter than air, his hip rose and let her hand slip underneath.
A moment later—or so it seemed—Jane was back across the room shutting the lamp off. She folded her arms. She stared at the blanket she’d left trailing in front of the couch. She bent and dragged it toward her by one corner. The tense way she held her neck was killing her. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders in a vaguely ecclesiastical fashion.