Into the Sun Page 9

  Her waist narrowed and her hips spread, a faint dark patch where her thighs shadowed together. A Celtic design circled her belly button. On her shoulder, there was a heart in a cross of melting ice. Above her breast, a square of barbed wire opened on a colorless heart suspended like the moon in mist.

  He touched his erection. That was crossing a line. He didn’t want to become a pervert like the ones in the newspaper.

  He steadied himself and moved away. He put the rake, the clippers, the bucket, and the plastic bags in the shed. He ran upstairs and grabbed a towel from the hamper and pulled off his shirt. He lay on his bed. He pushed down his pants and was gasping as soon as he started. He panted, seeing her in the bed, over him. The second time the pleasure was stronger.

  He was hungry. He went downstairs and ate, and then put on his rollerblades.

  The night was cool. He soared along the asphalt, the wheels swishing and skittering over dead leaves. He enjoyed hitting cracks, the instant, intuitive repositioning of his body. He raced through parking lots, jumping concrete dividers, and swept across empty streets. He reached the park along the lake and followed the path, picking up speed.

  The boy was with the fishermen again, staring over the water toward the glow of the oil refineries on the far shore. One of the fishermen murmured to him, and the boy replied in a low voice. The men laughed.

  Justin pivoted on his rollerblades and passed again, but by then the boy had turned, clearly realizing he was being watched — his face flushed, charged with anger.

  Justin looked around as if he’d been deciding where to go, and skated off. The strength and angularity of the boy’s bones lingered in his mind, like something he might have seen on a field trip — a savage fossil behind museum glass, a set of prehistoric jaws beneath a light.

  Justin learned the boy’s name at school. Clay Hervey. No one knew anything about him, and Justin didn’t divulge where he lived or that his father had left and never returned, abandoning him and his sister. Clay was in his homeroom, sitting in the back corner, his hands loose on the table, the skin scuffed off their knuckles. In place of his middle fingernail was clotted flesh.

  The teacher introduced him and asked him if he wanted to say something about himself.

  That’s okay, he told her, his voice like a man’s but soft, faintly hoarse.

  Nothing? she asked.

  Nah, he said, with the distant gaze of a soldier on parade.

  How about where you’re from?

  Maine.

  Thank you, Clay.

  You’re welcome.

  Justin wondered if Clay knew, as Justin’s father had asserted, that he wouldn’t be here for long.

  In the hall, Clay carried his books in one battered hand, his muscled arm slack. He kept his eyelids low, his focus somewhere between the floor and the horizon. Girls watched him. Boys edged away, trying to decide whether they could mock him. He was six foot two and had the hard, cooked-down muscle of a man, not the bloated bulk of young athletes.

  After a week, kids started calling him weirdo behind his back. Girls who’d smiled at him and been ignored muttered creep or psycho.

  In gym, the boys played basketball — shirts against skins. Justin scored two points. He and Clay were shirts. Clay intercepted passes, loping across the floor to feed the ball ahead. He probably didn’t play often. Justin had seen other athletic kids who weren’t good shots and didn’t want to look bad work the defense like this.

  The skins were rallying, and Dylan, their best player, kept blocking shots violently. He intercepted and threw a hard pass, and Clay lunged for the ball and caught it.

  Dylan moved in to keep him from dribbling or passing. He was the largest boy in the grade, taller even than Clay, towheaded and so pale veins shone beneath his skin. He had a black belt and told stories about karate tournaments, and when he rammed his sweaty armpit into players’ faces on the basketball court, they didn’t retaliate. He tried this now, but Clay twisted away, the ball between his hands, his forearms parallel to the floor. Dylan closed the gap, and Clay swung back, his elbow catching Dylan’s solar plexus — a hollow sound like a drum. Dylan’s knees hit the floor. Justin felt the vibrations through the soles of his sneakers.

  Between classes, kids talked about how Clay had braced with his foot, dipping his knee inward the way a boxer drives a punch. Dylan hadn’t been able to stand up for ten minutes and was now announcing that he’d get revenge. In the hallway, as he was walking away from his girlfriend, Melody, Clay came up behind her.

  Hey, he said. That was all the other kids heard. He leaned in and whispered something in her ear. Though she had the black hair and olive complexion of a Cajun, she turned red from her hairline down. She hurried to her next class, clutching her books to her chest.

  Before lunch, Dylan found her at her locker, and as he lowered his head to speak to her, she backhanded him. Like he was a bitch, kids would later joke. He retreated, the imprint gathering in the stung, red skin.

  Dylan found Clay in the cafeteria and squared off.

  What did you tell her?

  The truth. I heard what you said in the locker room. Why don’t you own up?

  Clay’s words had the same low, gravelly restraint as when he’d spoken in class.

  The lunch monitor was calling other teachers, not wanting to get between them by herself. Dylan made a fist and moved his shoulder back. Clay hadn’t budged, hadn’t even lifted his hands.

  You’re a liar, Dylan said, his voice suddenly whiny.

  If I am, take me down. Prove it.

  The lunch monitor was shouting, moving her arms as if directing traffic. Dylan walked away.

  Over the next few days, everyone agreed that Dylan had bragged about what he’d done with Melody at the New Year’s party in an upstairs bedroom, and one afternoon, in the lockers, a group of boys led by Melody’s brother pushed him down, punching and kicking him.

  Kids began gravitating to Clay, walking next to him between classes and sitting with him at lunch. He shared little about himself, keeping his answers simple: he was from Maine; neither the economy nor the weather was much up there, so his family came south. People repeated this. Justin told it to his father one evening, and his father sighed.

  Son, Louisiana isn’t exactly Silicon Valley. I wouldn’t trust a word that boy says.

  But Clay’s reputation grew: his natural prowess in sports, his simultaneous competence and indifference in class, his modesty and adult disregard for most of what went on around him. Occasionally, he passed Justin in the hallway, and they nodded.

  One afternoon Justin left his rollerblades in his locker and timed his departure with Clay’s. Heading home? he asked.

  Yeah, Clay said, and extended a hand. Hey, man. I’m Clay.

  Justin.

  They shook hands. Clay’s irises were brown at the edges, green spreading raggedly from his pupils — small pale stars whose brightness eclipsed the rest.

  I’ll keep you company back. Most of the way at least.

  I just wanted to say that what you did with Dylan was badass.

  Clay shrugged, his stride loose and relaxed.

  Dylan’s soft, he said. You see the lunches his mother packs? Organic crackers and cookies. And his binders are all organized, with labels in a woman’s handwriting. He’s never kicked anyone’s ass.

  Justin said nothing. His mother helped him organize things and used to make his bed until his father called an end to it. His parents had fought for a week over her pampering — his father’s word. That was just the previous summer.

  Anyway, man, it was good to meet you, Clay said when they were a block from the house. He extended his hand. They shook, and he kept on past the driveway.

  For the rest of the week, Justin walked home with Clay. He asked him questions — How long have you been practicing pull-ups? Did you run track at your old
school? — but didn’t mention team sports since it was clear Clay hadn’t played them much.

  Over dinner, Justin’s parents speculated about whether Clay’s father would return, whether that woman — Justin’s father didn’t seem to know what to call her — would get a job.

  She’ll have to put her trench coat back on, he said. And the boy doesn’t even live here. He comes at six in the morning, eats, I guess, and leaves.

  Monday, a few kids gossiped that Clay had shown up at a party and that when Melody got drunk, he took her home in her car.

  That afternoon, as he and Justin walked back from school, Clay said, Can I tell you something?

  Justin nodded. He’d never felt this nervous around another kid and sometimes wished he’d taken his father’s advice to leave Clay alone, but each casual disclosure seemed a step closer to an explanation for the mysteries of Clay’s life.

  You have to swear you’ll never repeat it.

  I won’t. I promise.

  It’s just that, you know, we’re neighbors and we’re kind of becoming friends.

  Justin moistened his lips with his tongue. They’d reached the shady street where they usually said goodbye. Clay asked if his parents were home, and when Justin said they weren’t, he went up the walkway and sat on the brick porch. Justin joined him.

  It’s my father, Clay said. My real father, not the guy we came with. My father is dangerous. I’m here because we had to escape him.

  You and your …

  Yeah, me and my mother.

  Justin closed his eyes, afraid they’d betray his shock, his sudden guilt that the woman he’d spied on wasn’t Clay’s sister.

  My father went to prison when I was a baby. When he got out, he tried to kidnap me and was put back in. Now he’s out again, so we had to run away. My stepfather came down with us, but he was too scared to stay.

  That’s rough, Justin said, though he didn’t believe it was possible to kidnap Clay.

  Anyway, you can’t tell anyone anything about me.

  I won’t. I swear.

  Clay stood and Justin got up. They shook hands.

  I’ll see you later. I have to go to work.

  Clay loped out past the hedges and down the street. Justin understood what he’d meant by anything — not his strange mother, not even the carriage house.

  One afternoon they talked about guns, and after Clay described the rifles he’d shot in Maine, Justin told him about an illustrated book on the history of the rifle he’d gotten for his last birthday. He invited Clay inside to see it, but when Justin opened the door to his room, Clay stopped and said, What in the hell do you need all this stuff for?

  The room had a bed, a desk, and an exercise area with a bench press. Model airplanes hung from strings in an air battle that spanned the twentieth century: a Boeing P-26 Peashooter and a B-17 Flying Fortress positioned against the F-15 Eagle, the F-16 Fighting Falcon, and the F-117 Nighthawk. There were pennants, a rack of baseball caps, comics and graphic novels, Narnia and Tolkien. Fish glided through the aquarium.

  Justin’s cheeks burned. Clay hesitated, appearing startled by the intensity of his own reaction, but then he crossed the room and rapped his knuckles against an army recruitment poster: a soldier stalking through a forest and, beneath him, the words, Be All You Can Be.

  But this, he said, this is fucking badass.

  Justin’s father had been in Vietnam, and his grandfather had told stories about Korea and about his own father and uncles in World War II — Salerno or Monte Cassino. A Falker had fought in every American war. Justin repeated all this, talking until the heat faded from his cheeks.

  Let’s join the Marines together, Clay said, as if there’d been no discomfort.

  Justin nodded, his voice locked, a jammed mechanism.

  You in? Clay asked.

  Yeah, Justin said. Fuck yeah.

  Clay laughed and extended his big palm, holding it up. They shook hands.

  As soon as Clay left for work, Justin packed up his room: the pennants and books and balsa wood airplanes he’d made only a year before. He dug up family heirlooms from the army and positioned them on the shelves.

  That Saturday, when his mother came in with his folded clothes, she stopped as abruptly as Clay had. She put the clothes on his chair, and minutes later her voice rose downstairs, soon overpowered as his father shouted that service was a family tradition — Just because Clinton starved the armed forces, he said, doesn’t mean we don’t need soldiers. You send a boy down a safe path, he won’t come back a man.

  All through the mild gulf winter and into the spring, Justin and Clay spent afternoons together. Justin forced himself not to think about Clay’s mother, though, impulsively, he spied on her twice more — the times she was in the bathtub again as he did the yard.

  With his allowance, Justin bought manuals on guns, fighter jets, and tanks. He and Clay hunched over them, contemplating the strengths and shortcomings of each weapon. They talked about little else. There were rumors at school that Clay was seeing Melody, but he rarely spoke to her in the hallway, and never mentioned her. He seemed contained, tightly wound, inspecting weapons in the manuals as if they were solutions.

  At first, Clay left the house before Justin’s parents came home — For work, he said, not disclosing where — but eventually Justin told his father that he and Clay planned to join the Marines together. His father warmed to the idea of their friendship, telling Justin’s mother it reminded him of how boys used to be, that Justin and the military would set Clay on the straight and narrow. He explained to Justin that the army had made a coherent nation, joining men from different classes and cultures to forge an American identity. He showed them how to dismantle rifles and clean them, and shared stories about his tour in Vietnam and a stint in Okinawa managing supplies, after which he applied his skills to start a shipping company.

  At a Friday night party, as Clay and Justin were talking about the best assault rifles, Willard, another junior, said he could outshoot both of them. Willard’s father ran a boxing gym, and though Willard’s height and build were average, he’d once dropped an older kid with a single punch. A round clump of scar tissue on his forehead made him look as if he’d been shot in the brain and left fearless.

  You’re dreaming on your feet, Clay told him, and Willard flushed, the knot of scar a white bead. Clay proposed a challenge: they’d separate into paintball teams of two and hunt each other. The boys paired off, and Willard punched Chuck in the shoulder. Chuck was an athlete and a hunter who wore army shirts to school, his sleeves rolled up on his biceps.

  That Saturday, they met at a place Willard knew, an old junkyard whose owner had arranged the defunct vehicles for tactical battles: an apocalyptic landscape of ruined buses, trucks, and cars, rusted-out husks sunken in weeds. The owner rented the area by the hour, supplying masks and guns, and sold only red paintballs. The scattered wrecks were splattered, paint mixing with shades of rust.

  The boys had brought white undershirts, and with Sharpies they numbered each of the nine teams of two. It was May, the day hot and humid, and within minutes of spreading out to find a position, Justin was soaked with sweat. He kept licking his lips and had to pause to drink from the water bottle in his backpack.

  A sign read: Mowed grass sprayed monthly for chiggers and ticks, but enter trees at your own risk. Beware of snakes.

  Grass seed speckled Justin’s arms as he and Clay crept past a collapsing farm machine and a wrecked UPS van shrouded in wisteria. Webbed windshields refracted the sunlight.

  Clay led him to a four-car cluster on a slight rise where they had a vantage on the junkyard. Decades of vines and weeds had grown up through the chain link surrounding it, creating a living wall. He directed Justin’s attention between two dense clumps of trees.

  This is a bottleneck, he said. Three-fourths of the junkyard is on that side, and one-four
th is just past us. This clearing is the only alley between the trees. We’ll stay here and pick them off. They’ll drive each other toward us, and we’ll drive them back into their enemies’ fire.

  The plan worked so well that, over the next two hours, they systematically picked off their opponents.

  Watch for Willard, Clay told him. He’s the only one who wants to win this bad enough.

  Justin scanned the junkyard, though it was hard to draw his attention from Clay — the way he measured his energy, patiently taking out opponents but never exposing himself.

  Running footsteps thudded as three boys sprinted between the scattered cars, each with a different number. Willard and Chuck followed — 2s on their sweat-soaked shirts — flushing the other boys into the bottleneck between the trees. Willard let Chuck outpace him, and when Clay shot Chuck in the forehead, red spraying into his hair and across his goggles, Willard veered off. He leapt into the undergrowth as Justin shot. Clay took out the three boys.

  A gun clacked far off behind Justin, and the paintball struck a car inches away, spraying his cheek. Clay spun and shot their attacker, a seven.

  Willard’s almost to the other side, Justin said.

  As the descending sun lit the trees, Willard stumbled through bands of light, his feet caught up in the trash and vines.

  Come on, Clay said. They ran behind cars as Willard broke from the forest, a V of sweat from his shoulders to his crotch.

  Go at him and keep firing, Clay whispered. Force him to head for the gap between the fence and that truck.

  Justin sprinted, shooting as he came through the vehicles. Neither he nor Willard had a clear shot. Willard fired twice, the paintballs bursting into red splotches on the side of a car, and then he ran along the fence’s gnarled growth toward a box truck. A gun fired three times, the shots hitting him in the chest. He put his elbows to his knees, panting, and peeled off his mask.

  Justin was afraid Clay might lord the victory, but instead he offered his hand.

  Hell of a good fight, brother.

  Willard took it. It’s fucking hot, he said.