Tag Archives: Wolfchild
Wolfchild
In those days, we drove through the night. The cats in their carrier and Steven at the wheel, and for a while I read to us. Then later we got stoned and listened to music. We went from dark country roads to long empty highways and then into the tunnel to the city becalmed. We parked the car and carried our stuff upstairs and as soon as I let the cats out, I noticed the black feathers in their cage. “Steven?” I called. “What’s in here?”
He peered into the carrier. “Feathers,” he said.
“Very good, Mr. Cornell. But where’d they come from?” I pulled out the towel and spread it on the dining table. Black feathers stuck together, they were glossy with moisture. “You think they got a bird?”
“The girls? I doubt it.”
I walked into the bedroom where the cats lounged on the bed. It was true what Steven said. Our girls were far too finicky to eat in the wild. “Sweetie,” I said, lifting Toledo toward the light. My little gray tiger, more a love junkie than a hunter. She watched me with big eyes and waited for my diagnosis. But there was nothing around her mouth, no feathers or bird remains. I dropped her on the bed and reached for big black Omaha. Rolled her on her side. She growled and hissed, and spread her legs wide open. “You big toughie,” I said. There was nothing on her either.
So maybe the feathers— I tried to remember. Had I closed the basement windows? Was there a chicken behind the boiler? It was always like this. Two houses, two sets of problems. Worrying about one place while living at the other. I tossed the feathers in the garbage and shook out the towel.
That night, we fell asleep with the television on. I woke a little after four. Steven was snoring beside me. I pulled back the curtain and peered outside. It was quiet, no traffic on the avenue in front of our apartment. I climbed over Steven and gathered the take-out containers from atop the desk.
Out in the main room, I noticed Parrain. His portrait light was on, shining down on those dark eyes which had cared for me since adolescence. “You should be in bed, Ducky,” I said, imitating his voice. He used to call me Ducky. He used to sit up, waiting for me, the nights I came crawling home at dawn. “Go back to sleep,” I said, flicking off the light. “Everything’s fine.”
Usually Steven peed with me. One of us rising, the other following behind. Our bed was small like that, and when one of us stirred— We would stand together around the toilet, toes touching, eyes squinting. Then we’d hurry back to bed, and curl together as if we’d never gotten up. But this night, he slept on, even after I flushed.
I went to the front windows and peered through the wooden shutters. Outside, a cab slowed and stopped at the intersection — and then ran the red light. Across the avenue, a doorman sauntered into the night. He was tall and dark, not wearing a coat or hat in the late summer heat. He straightened his tie, ran a hand over his hair. Thick raven-dark hair. He strolled to the intersection, then back to the awning. Toothpick in his mouth.
Apart from the doorman, the avenue was deserted. No pedestrians, no cars, and very few lighted windows in the buildings along the street. People were sleeping, and in the final hours of night, it seemed the doorman and I were the only ones awake.
His feet planted apart, the doorman scratched his groin and gazed toward my window. I pulled open the shutters and feigned a yawn. Stretched my arms above my head. Then palms against the window, I stared at the doorman across the street.
He leaned against the awning’s brass pole, and looking down, cupped his crotch. Then slowly he lifted his head. His eyes holding mine like a flashlight in the dark. I slid my hand into my boxers and he nodded and narrowed his eyes, and in the silence of the room, I heard a low moaning whistle.
I shoved my boxers to the floor and climbed atop the window seat. My face against the glass, I spit into my palm and stroked my dick. The doorman stepped off the curb and in the space between two cars, he opened his pants. He pushed them to his thighs and rubbed his hand across his briefs. Then he let loose an erection which he grasped in both hands. His face a rictus of desire, his eyes bored into mine and his long tongue unraveled— and brushed against my face like a web wet with dew.
Without warning, without thinking, I was suddenly coming. Gobs spewing from my dick, splatting hard against the window, like rain, like glue, my breath coming in gulps, clouding up the glass.
Across the way, the doorman ran his tongue over his lips, licking almost to his nose and down to his chin. He licked his palm and smoothed into place the black forelock that had fallen forward. And once his face was composed, he fastened his pants, and then turned and headed back to the building.
Behind me, I heard the bed creak. I hopped from the window seat and reached for my boxers. I was staring at the mess on the window when Toledo jumped onto the cushion. Her eyes searched mine, her nose in the air, as her tail swished back and forth across the glass.
“Oh, no. Don’t do that,” I whispered, whisking her into my arms. I swabbed the window with my boxers and wiped at her tail. “You don’t want that on you.”
But she didn’t care. She just purred all the louder. The purr like a gurgle, her happiest sound.
“What are you doing?”
I turned and there was Steven, at the room’s far end. I couldn’t make out his face; he looked more like a shadow. “I had to pee,” I said, dropping Toledo into a chair. “You didn’t hear me get up?”
“No,” he said, heading for the bathroom.
I followed him in, stood next to him at the toilet. I stroked his side as his water hit the toilet.
“I thought you had to pee,” he said.
“I did,” I said, staring at my dick from which nothing more flowed.
“Where are your shorts?” he asked.
“I kicked them off. I got hot,” I said, reaching for his dick. “You hot too?”
He batted my hand away — and then took it by the wrist. “C’mon, come to bed,” he said. He pulled me from the bathroom. “What were you doing by the window?” he asked, pointing toward the open shutters.
“Just looking out,” I said. “I’ll close them.”
I kept my body from view as I shoved the shutters back into place. Then I latched the two together and locked out the night. I knelt and felt around for my boxers. My head cocked for listening, not just for Steven in the bedroom but also for the sound which had drawn me to the window in the first place. A voice, a whistle? I shook my head and sighed. It hardly seemed like me now. Stark naked in the window—
Things happened in the city. All across its smooth veneer, there were streaks and smudges, specks of dirt. People weren’t always what they seemed. There were married men on their knees in the underbrush of parks and priests in peep shows and doctors who diddled while their patients were unconscious. There were honors students who hustled in high-rise hotels and ladies who lunched on young Latino boys. They all lived in the city. And the doorman and I, we lived here too—
“C’mon, what’re you doing?” Steven called from the bedroom.
“I’m coming,” I said, shoving my boxers under the armchair and heading for his arms.
The next morning, there were two things. They stuck in my mind like grit in my eye.
I met Billie for coffee. Billie lived in the building across from ours, when she wasn’t on the road. I told her I’d noticed her new doorman the night before.
“What new doorman?” she asked, scanning the headlines of the morning paper.
“You know, the dark-haired one,” I said, touching her hand. “Very humpy.”
Billie shook her head. “I didn’t see him,” she said. “Chester was on the door when I came in.”
“Not Chester,” I said. Short gray-haired Chester. “The tall guy with thick black hair. He has these really dark eyes.”
“Wrong building, sweetie,” she said. She went back to her paper. “What time you guys get in anyway? I didn’t see your lights when I got home.”
“It was late,” I said. “Later than usual.”
And though I wanted to ask again, just to make sure, I didn’t say any more about it. And it seemed she was right. I didn’t see that doorman again, not that night or the next. Only Chester at the door. And passing him one night, when I mentioned something about another doorman, he said the same thing Billie had. There was no new doorman, not at the building across from mine.
And the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed that the doorman I’d noticed was a doorman at all. Maybe just a guy in white shirt and tie. Maybe I hadn’t actually seen him come out of Billie’s building. Maybe he’d been hanging around outside, leaning against the wall. And maybe when it was over, after he’d turned away from me, maybe he hadn’t gone into the building but just walked away down the street.
There was no way to know for sure, not that I could see. Not about the raven-haired doorman or the other thing that bothered me.
That next morning, after Steven had left for work, I’d gone to the window. I’d spritzed down the glass and wiped it clean and I’d knelt by the chair and felt around for my boxers. But my fingers had brushed against something— And I’d lifted the chair skirt and peered under, and there stuck to my boxers was one black feather. I pulled the feather off and held it to the light. I held it out to Toledo but she hurried away.
I was sure it was one of the feathers from the cage. But the garbage had already gone out and I had nothing to compare it with. So I flushed it down the toilet and tried to forget about it.
Wolfchild
There was a message on the wall. TO ALL THE HOT MEN AND CUTE BOYS WHO SATISFIED ME FOR THE PAST FOUR YEARS: I’M LEAVING THE CITY NOW AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE I’M GOING BUT I’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER EVERYONE WHO KEPT THIS TEAROOM HOT, ESPECIALLY THE BLOND RUNNER WHO LET ME SUCK HIS DICK ON WEDNESDAYS AND ALSO FERNANDO AND ALL THE REST OF YOU. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
I leaned down and checked under the stalls. No one but me in the men’s room on the seventh floor. I reread the words which sloped down the wall. I saw the writer on his knees, black marker in hand. One last time in this tearoom and then he was gone, leaving only his message on the wall. A wall like Lascaux, covered with drawings and stick figures, and egg-white dribbles of release. I felt like I’d missed so much, like walking into a party that was almost over. Everything that had happened here was already history.
I heard a door slam, and then footsteps down the hall. I slipped into the stall next to the urinals, its walls as covered as the one I’d just been reading. Acronyms and phone numbers, in pencil and ink. Drawings of assholes and dicks and cum-dripping mouths. Meet me Wednesdays at ten I’ve got 8½ rock hard big black dick let me cum Uncut 7½ soft you can choke on my big Spanish dick I need a blowjob I’ve been waiting. Black dick, Hispanic, blond-haired, and shaved, they were all advertising in the stall of a campus toilet.
The restroom door crashed open, and I sat down, carefully, on the very edge of the toilet seat. I heard a man spit into the sink, and then water from a faucet. I opened my backpack, stared intently inside. The man began to whistle, and I mouthed the words. Then the towel dispenser cranked, and the door slammed open, and the whistling man was gone.
Right then is when I should have left. I should have hurried from the stall and then down the hall. I had a class to teach in twenty minutes. I had notes to go over, a lecture to give. And I had no business being in this restroom.
For the past couple weeks, I’d been eating my lunch in an empty classroom down the hall. Away from all other faculty and the needs of my students. I could sit alone in that classroom and read the newspaper section by section. Without interruption.
I’d often heard the doors, opening and closing, and the footsteps down the hall, but always before I’d imagined someone might disturb me. It hadn’t occurred to me there was another reason for being on this hall. Blond preppy bottom needs to be spanked I’M A STRAIGHT GUY WHO’S CURIOUS (I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND BUT I THINK ABOUT GUYS) Need your dick sucked? M-F, 10:00 — 2:30 No fems or fatties, please Where are the other tearooms on this campus? I’m new here I’M THE DADDY YOU’RE LOOKING FOR Call me TO the ASIAN with the BIG dick: Sorry about last week How about tomorrow? Me and my two frat brothers want to fuck a black boy If you are interested Horny sophomore looking for a football player to suck my eight-inch dick I’ve been hear since eight am and no one. My dick was hard. So many voices, such desire, and to think of all the lunch hours I’d wasted reading a newspaper down the hall.
Not ten minutes before, I’d left that classroom, just as I usually did when I finished my lunch, except this time I’d seen a boy at the other end of the hall. Something about the way he walked, wearing jeans and a baseball cap and a hooded sweatshirt, and even after he’d turned the corner and disappeared, I’d followed him down the hall, into this bathroom.
The door opened again, and I heard it the way I’d so often heard it in the background of my mind, like a bell that tells you it’s time to eat. There was someone else in the toilet. Someone just inside the door. Standing there, listening, just the way I’d listened when I’d first come in.
He came over and stood in front of a urinal. I could see him through a hole in the wooden stall door. Not his face, but his jeans, and his fingers unbuttoning—
I considered making a dash for the door, escaping down the hall – but something kept me from moving. The man was just standing there, not peeing into the urinal. And the room was so quiet. I was seated on the toilet’s edge, almost holding my breath.
And then the man stepped back a bit and turned slightly toward me.
I jerked away from the hole, sat back on the toilet seat and rummaged in my backpack. And then I leaned forward again, my eye against the hole.
The man was stroking his dick, breathing heavier now. Making no attempt to be quiet. We had broken the silence that had brought us together. I ran my eye along the door frame, surveying his body. Down his legs to his boots, then back up to his head. Dark glasses covered his eyes. He poked his dick along the opening as his fingers reached over the door. I stood very still. I knew what I wanted but I didn’t want to think about what I was doing. My eyes on the man’s dick, l slid back the bolt on the door.
The door fell partially open and the man pushed his way in. He flipped my tie over my shoulder and unbuttoned my shirt. I watched his fingers, stared at his dick. I didn’t meet his eyes. Long fingers, clean nails. He yanked up my tee and touched my skin.
I reached around behind him and bolted the door. I touched his shoulder, ran my fingers down his chest. Grabbed hold of his dick. He opened my pants; I was sticking straight out. He pushed my pants to the floor and then ducked his head and pulled his tee behind his neck. Broad chest, black hair. I kept one hand on his dick, and the other on his chest.
Then he pulled me closer, one hand on my ass, and his finger slipped in, and I moaned without thinking, his entry so certain. He kept me where he wanted, one finger inside and one hand stroking. He kept me on the edge until he was ready himself. Until his breath was short like mine and his finger went deeper and his hand stroked my dickhead and I shot against the wall just a moment before he did. Great gobs down the wall, two more trails for history.
I was suddenly weak. Sweat beaded my brow and my legs were shaky. I grabbed the man’s wrist and pulled his finger from inside me.
The man watched me from behind his sunglasses as he swiped the wall, through his cum and mine, and then sucked his finger clean.
I wanted out then, more than ever. Something thick was in my mouth and I spit in the toilet. I pulled up my pants and spun the toilet paper round and round. And when I turned back around, the man slipped from the stall.
At last I was alone. I slid the bolt into place. I wiped myself clean, back and front, and flushed the toilet, but the smell was still there. I wiped down the wall, and flushed again. Sweat and semen, so rich before release, so ripe in the air. I needed a shower. I checked my watch. Ten minutes to class.
The man was at the sink; the water was running. He cranked out some towels. And then it was quiet. As quiet as the moment when he’d first walked in.
And then suddenly he was there, right in front of the stall door. His boots, I saw him rise up and look over the door.
Quickly, I turned and flushed again. I kept my back to the door. I fiddled with my backpack. I didn’t turn around, not until I heard the restroom door close. Then I knelt and peered across the bathroom floor. Once again, I was alone.
I darted from the stall and stood at the sink. I stared into the mirror. My face was flushed and sweaty. I splashed my face with water, ran my fingers through my hair. I tried to smile but I looked nervous. I narrowed my eyes and willed authority into being. The man admired by his students. I’d been teaching for ten years. I licked my palm and sniffed. My breath reeked. I placed my backpack on the sink, unzipped the front pocket. Breath mints, I needed breath mints.
I pulled out Steven’s house keys. He must’ve left them in my backpack on the way home from the country. I’d have to call him and— I caught my eyes in the mirror. What had happened in the stall had nothing to do with him. It was release, nothing more. An animal urge, ungoverned by reason, and I’d dealt with it, and now it was over. There was nothing in the stall to prove I’d been there. It was over, it was done with, and so I headed to class.
Wolfchild
Weeks flew by like windblown papers – a flurry of stories about friends and movies, dinners and theatre, and it wasn’t until October that we headed back to the country. The roads out of the city were crowded – it was a holiday weekend, and peak leaf season too. Nature’s last stand before winter stormed in. Already darkness came earlier. Halfway to the house, it was thick around us. There were fewer cars on the country roads, and the occasional pair of headlights blinded us with their hi-beams.
Our house was in the woods, three or four miles from the ocean. We got north winds so strong they snapped pine trees in half and we also got fog. It was odd weather, a bit of the shore and some of the forest too. Expect the unexpected, that’s what the locals said. We tried to be like that. Returning to the house after having been away, we tried to be prepared for what nature had wrought. Snow blanketing the house, or a carpet of ants across the yellow pine floors. Frozen pipes, nests of wasps. Bats and black snakes. A tree splintered atop the porch.
“Is that the electrical line?” Steven asked. He backed up the car so the headlights hit the roof.
“Great. So we don’t have power?”
“Not if the tree knocked it out. I’ll go check,” he said, heading up the lawn.
I got out of the car and peed on the grass. It was quiet, so quiet in the country. I stared at the sky, at the stars I could never find in the city. We could use candles if we needed. There were some in the basement or— The porch light flashed on.
Omaha cried to get out, her voice honking like a goose. “Just a minute,” I said, pulling the cage from the car. The girls knew where they were. They loved the country house. The cool yellow pine floors and grass they could eat and the birds at the feeder each morning.
I trudged up the lawn. The front door swung open and Steven stood there in the porch light. “Everything okay?” I asked.
“You’re not gonna believe this,” he said.
“Oh God. What is it?” I stopped where I was.
“Just kidding,” Steven said. “Everything’s fine.”
“Asshole,” I said. “Get the bags.”
We made the house ours again. We turned up the heat and put on some music. We fed the girls and watered the plants. And then we made ourselves a cocktail and sat outside on the porch. We didn’t say much. I liked that about the country house, the way both of us relaxed into silence. We were a happy couple but sometimes the city made us tense. And where we might’ve turned on the t.v., in the country we took a walk.
We cut across the lawn and leaves crackled underfoot. Tomorrow we’d have to do the gutters. We made our way through the pine trees which bordered our yard, and then walked along a dirt road. A road no longer used, it followed the railroad tracks, narrowing to a path. Cool air brushed my face, a hint of winter ahead, tapping on our door.
I glanced back at our house which was barely visible through the trees. “You leave the light on upstairs?” I asked. We had a thing about lights. He left them on.
“I did not. You took the bags up,” Steven said. “You want to keep going or should we head back?”
Actually, I hadn’t even been upstairs, not since we’d arrived. I turned from the house and stared in front of us. It was dark, but not so dark that we couldn’t see. “All right, let’s keep going,” I said, taking Steven’s hand.
We walked above the railroad tracks, on an embankment flanked by a barbed-wire fence. Years before, in the summers with my cousins, I used to walk the railroad tracks which cut through my grandmother’s farm. One year I’d taken Steven there and the two of us had fished in the pond. Maybe when we’d bought this house, I’d imagined days like that. We’d lost so many friends in the city, maybe I’d been hoping this house would remind us of simpler times. A house with screen doors and a yard and a big front porch. We left the windows open all summer. And there were chipmunks and birds, rabbits and squirrels. And blocks of morning sun on the walls, and at night, we stood in the yard and stared at the stars.
Of course there was also the maintenance. Painting and mowing and planting and raking, and rarely had we ventured beyond our own property.
The barbed-wire fence belonged to our nearest neighbors. Their chicken wasn’t the only animal which had wandered into our yard. One time their pigs had gotten loose. A whole pack of pigs. I’d seen them coming toward me in the chaise and I’d bolted for the porch—
“What?” Steven asked. “What are you laughing at?”
“Those pigs,” I said, grinning. “Remember—”
“Yeah. You and Will sitting naked in the yard. That’s what scared them.”
Yes, Will had been there too. Not that we’d been doing anything. Just sunbathing nude. Something you couldn’t do in the city. Something Steven didn’t think we should do in the country either.
“It’s weird we never see them,” I said. Apart from the boy, we hadn’t met our neighbors. We didn’t know his parents, or his siblings if he had any. “I mean, when my parents bought a farm—”
“Your parents bought a farm in a place much different from this,” Steven said.
He did have a point. We’d bought our house because we couldn’t afford waterfront. We’d imagined biking to the shore; it wasn’t that far. And so we’d ended up in a place where people drove pick-up trucks. And not as a metaphor for a simpler life. And the pick-ups weren’t very new and most of them had gun racks. Once, coming in for the weekend, we’d passed three kids on our road. Three barefoot kids, they could’ve stepped out of a WPA photograph. They’d stared at us as we drove by, and one of them had yelled something I couldn’t hear. But the boy wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t one of those three kids. I would’ve remembered him.
“What’s that?” Steven asked, pointing toward a small brick shed.
“A smokehouse, I think,” I said. The shed was low to the ground, too low for an outhouse, and there was a padlock on the door. It reminded me of the smokehouse at my grandmother’s farm.
“For pigs?” Steven asked, slipping between the barbed wire.
“Probably,” I said, seeing hams in moldy muslin hanging from a smokehouse ceiling. “What’re you doing?”
“I just want to have a look,” he said.
“It’s locked,” I said. “You can’t go in there.”
“It’s hot,” Steven said, his hands on the brick.
I tried to remember when hogs were butchered. Did you fatten them all summer and then kill them in the fall?
“Come here a minute,” Steven said from the other side of the smokehouse.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m quite happy here.”
“No, really, I want you to see this.”
I looked behind me, and then slipped between the fence and onto our neighbors’ property. “I’m ready to go back,” I said. “How about you?”
“Check this out,” Steven said.
I stared at the pile of bones. A cairn of bones. White bones in the dark night. Enough bones to sate a pack of wild dogs. “Bones,” I said.
“What are they doing here?”
“I don’t know. It’s a smokehouse. Come on, I’m going back. Are you coming?”
Steven crouched by the bones and poked them with a stick.
“That’s enough,” I said, grabbing his arm. “Let’s go.”
Steven jerked his arm away from me, but he followed me to the fence. “What’s wrong with you?” he said. “They’re just bones. They might look good on the sun porch.”
“Are you crazy?” I said. “You don’t know where those bones have been.” I held the barbed wires apart for him. “Don’t you remember that murder where they killed that guy in the smokehouse? They handcuffed him and covered his head with a leather mask and then they fucked him and shot him, point blank.”
Steven stared at me. “Jesus,” he said. “How do you remember stuff like that?”
“I don’t know. I just do.”
“Was that really in a smokehouse?”
“Absolutely,” I said. I could still see the photographs from the newspapers. The leather mask, the hands bound behind the victim’s back.
“No shit,” Steven said. “Slow down a little, would you?”
I was half a length in front of him. Walking faster than before. I stopped and stared back at the smokehouse but there was nothing to see. “Sorry,” I said, taking his hand. “I’m just tired.”
But even with a book, I couldn’t fall asleep. It was only me. Steven was snoring, heading toward a roar. The drive had exhausted him, and of course he’d worked all day at his office while I— Well, I’d done a little reading, graded some student essays, and then cleaned the apartment and packed us up. And now we were here, once again in the country, and I was more awake than I’d been all day.
I slipped out of bed. I cupped my hands to the window and peered out. I couldn’t see anything, but again I heard the scratching. At first I’d thought it was Toledo. She scratched at closed doors, cried to get in. But this noise was from outside, I knew it now. There was something on the porch roof.
I got the flashlight from the nightstand and opened the window, quietly. And then I flashed on the light. There were two or three crows pecking at the tree and they squawked as the light hit them and flew into the air, and one headed toward me, and I jumped and dropped the light which crashed to the floor.
“What’s wrong? What is it?” Steven shouted, sitting up.
“Nothing. I just dropped the light.”
“What’re you doing?”
“There were birds— Crows,” I said, shutting off the light. “A bunch of crows,” I said. “They were on that tree on the roof.”
“Yeah, so?” Steven said, getting out of bed. “We’re in the country, remember?”
I followed him into the bathroom. “I know, but they were on the roof.”
Steven stared at me as he peed. “How about we sleep tonight and deal with the roof in the morning, huh?”
I grinned and shrugged, and that’s what we did the next morning. Right after breakfast, we got out the ladder and climbed up onto the porch roof. The splintered pine tree was caught between two thick strands of electrical wire.
“Watch it,” Steven said. “Don’t pull it like that. You’re gonna— Watch the wires.”
I broke off a dead branch, and pine cones scattered across the roof. “Are you sure we should be doing this? I mean, I don’t want to get electrocuted.”
“You’re not, not if you’re careful,” Steven said, squatting down by the eaves. “Just hold that end up, would you? I’m gonna try and—”
“What is it?”
“There’s a nest here and—”
“I’m gonna set this down, okay?”
“No, wait, hold it there. I’ve almost got it free. Wait a sec— There, now wait, just hold on—”
And then the tree was free from the wires and too heavy for me to hold and I dropped my end and the tree jerked away from Steven.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Steven yelled.
“I couldn’t hold it,” I said.
Steven shook his head. “What would I do without you?” he asked. “Come on, help me roll this off the roof.”
We pushed the splintered tree to the edge and then kicked it over.
“Hey, watch it.”
I glanced at Steven and then over the edge of the roof. The boy leaned out from the porch, gazing up at us. “You need some help?” he asked.
“What’re you doing down there?” Steven asked. “You could’ve been hurt.”
The boy hopped off the porch and kicked the dead tree with his toe.
“Money,” I mouthed to Steven, rubbing my thumb across my fingers.
“All right, hold the ladder for us. We’re coming down, ” Steven said. He turned to me. “Go ahead.”
I didn’t think to not trust the boy until I was on the ground. Until I met his eyes again, eyes which were merely cornflower blue.
“So? You need some help?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “Hold the ladder for Steven.” I sat on the porch and emptied out my gloves.
Steven came down cradling something in his hand. “Look at this nest,” he said, showing the boy.
The boy nodded without saying anything.
“Were there eggs?” I asked.
Steven shook his head. “No, just the remains.”
“Of the eggs?”
“The birds,” Steven said. “You up for doing the gutters?” he asked the boy.
“Whatever you guys want.”
I could think of a lot of things I wanted, but Steven said, “Okay, let’s drag this tree over to the woods first.”
The boy knelt at the tree’s middle and Steven and I took the ends. We jerked our way across the lawn — it was such a cumbersome tree — and then waded into the underbrush. On the count of three, we heaved the tree but the tree didn’t land more than a few feet from us. The boy and I looked at Steven.
“Well, we’ll leave it there for now,” Steven said. “You guys do the gutters while I rake the back.”
The boy and I nodded, suddenly partners. I carried the ladder to the far end of the house. “Want me to go up?” the boy asked.
“Sure, if you want,” I said. “Here, take my gloves.”
“I don’t need them,” he said, climbing the ladder. I could smell him, his boy-scent, even in the cool air. Autumn leaves and week-old sheets, a hint of sweat without bite. I stared at his ass as his fingers combed the gutters. He hurled down pine needles and dirt, acorns and pebbles. When he finished what he could reach, we moved the ladder and he climbed up again.
I couldn’t think what to say to him. He seemed different from the boys I used to teach in secondary school. The boys in the city, they used to talk so much and clamor for my attention. They used to give me a headache and that was why I was now grateful for the complacency of college students. This boy was quiet. What did he think of people like us? People from the city, we stole into the country at night and stayed through the weekend and then left again in the dark. We were the strangers in the landscape. “Hey,” I said, glancing at a clump of dirt and feathers. “You ever find that chicken?”
He looked down over his shoulder. “What chicken?” he asked.
“You know, the black one. Remember when we called you? A couple months—”
“That one got away.”
“Really? What do you mean?”
“Just disappeared.” He narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t see it again, did you?”
“Me? No, of course not.” I couldn’t stop myself from blushing. It felt like he was accusing me. “Never saw it again,” I said, shaking my head. “Really, we never did.”
The boy turned back to the gutter.
“I mean, we live in the city,” I said. “There aren’t any chickens in the city, you know.” I tried to smile but I felt stupid trying to make him believe me.
We moved the ladder around to the front. “I’ll do it for a while,” I said. “You hold the ladder. Just don’t jiggle it.”
He jiggled it, and almost smiled.
“Very funny,” I said. I climbed to the top step and surveyed the gutter. There was less debris on this side of the house. I looked at the bedroom windows. The one from which I’d shone the light the night before. I squinted at the corner under the eaves, where the tree had been tangled with the wires. There was something on the shingles. Something mashed or half-eaten. One time on the drive home, there was a seagull feeding in the middle of the road and it had lifted too late, and both of us, even before it hit the windshield, had tried to shield our faces. I started down the ladder.
“You guys live in the city, right?”
“When we’re not here,” I said, stepping off the ladder, looking for the rake. Over there, against the—
“You got a doorman?”
“A doorman?” I repeated. I stared at the boy who was leaning against the porch, his arms folded across his chest. The doorman, I thought. I stared at his eyes. Blue eyes fixed on mine. Brighter now, unwavering, they wouldn’t let me go. “No doorman,” I said, backing away, reaching for the rake. I held the rake out in front of me, and then quickly I turned and started around the house. But then I stopped, for the boy was doubled over, clutching his knees. Vomiting.
“You okay?” I asked.
He raised his head and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Something I ate,” he said, flinging spittle from his fingers. He looked at me then, with eyes that were merely blue. “I’ll clean it up,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Sit down. I’ll get you some water. And some money, too. I want to pay you for your help.” I dropped the rake and hurried around the house.
In the back yard, Steven was stuffing leaves into a black trash bag. I came up behind him and said, “That boy just got sick.”
“Sick?”
“Yeah, and you know what else, he knows where we live.”
“We’re neighbors, remember? What do you mean he got sick?”
“Not here. I mean in the city. He knows where we live in the city.”
“I doubt it,” Steven said, standing and tossing the bag over his shoulder. “He’s probably never even been to the city.”
“He vomited on the grass,” I said.
“Yeah? Must’ve had a rough night.”
I looked around the lawn at the neat piles of leaves. Steven Cornell kept the books for a well-known charity. His figures always balanced. He was a man of reason. “I think he might be really sick,” I said.
“He’s adolescent,” Steven said, starting for the woods. “He probably drank too much last night. Did you pay him?”
“You think ten’s enough?”
“Here, give him this,” Steven said, pulling a twenty from his pocket. “And tell him to come back next time we’re here.”
I walked back to the front of the house, the twenty in my hand. But the boy was nowhere to be seen.