After the Parade (29 page)

When Aaron first moved in, he rarely saw Rudy, who often did not come home after work, the first part of his day bleeding into the second, particularly when his final plumbing call involved a relieved homeowner expressing gratitude with a bottle. Other times, he came home briefly to put something in his stomach before going back out. While he sat in his recliner eating, a bottle of beer poking up from between his legs, he engaged Aaron in conversation, choosing unexpected topics, though Aaron was quick to hide his surprise. One night, for example, as Aaron sat reading
My Ántonia,
Rudy said that he preferred
Song of the Lark,
which Aaron had not read, though he was making his way through all of Cather's work.

“I'll read it next,” Aaron said. “Did you read
Death Comes for the Archbishop
?”

Rudy sighed. “I tried, but I didn't care for it much.”

“Me neither,” said Aaron, the first time he had admitted this to anyone because his teacher had told him that many people considered it Cather's masterpiece.

He had never seen Rudy with a book, but that spring when Rudy started taking him fishing, Aaron discovered that he carried one in his glove compartment and another in his tackle box, that he sat each night in his gently rocking boat reading until the light was nearly gone and just enough remained for him to steer to shore by. Rudy taught him how to drive his truck and manage the boat and determine how much line to let down. Aaron looked forward to these evenings, and though Rudy did not talk a lot, he thought that maybe Rudy liked having him around too.

One night, as they sat in the boat staring down at where their lines disappeared into the water, Rudy said, “It was the goddamn desks, you know. They always came around her too snug.” They had not been talking about Bernice before this. They had not been talking at all. Aaron pulled up their lines and turned the boat around, rowing the
whole way back instead of using the motor while Rudy sat quietly in the bow. Rudy stored his boat at Last Resort in exchange for handling their plumbing needs, but when they pulled to shore that night he was not sober enough to help Aaron get the boat out of the water. After Aaron had struggled several minutes on his own, a voice came from the dock, asking whether they needed help.

“Walter,” Rudy called back. “Give this boy a hand.”

Together, Aaron and the man hauled the boat out and got it stored while Rudy gave orders from the dock, where he sat, still drinking. When they were finished, they went over to join Rudy, who introduced them by saying, “Aaron, this here's Walter Shapiro. He's a professor at the university in Moorhead and no doubt the only goddamn Jew in a thirty-mile radius.” Walter laughed at the introduction and shook Aaron's hand, and the three of them went into Walter's cabin for what Walter called “a nightcap.” It was there in the lighted cabin that Aaron recognized Walter as the man who had come into the café for breakfast three years earlier, the man who read a book in French while he ate.

“You came into my mother's café for breakfast,” Aaron said. “The Trout Café?”

“I remember,” Walter said. “Your mother was an excellent cook. That's why I had to stop coming, or I would have started to look like Rudy here.” Rudy laughed, though Aaron would later learn that men did not always like to have their weight discussed either. He would also learn, after he and Walter had become lovers, that he was the real reason Walter had not come in again. “You were such a lovely boy,” Walter would explain. “So wistful and polite and filled with yearning.”

Just like that it became the three of them motoring out in Rudy's boat each night, Rudy listening as Aaron and Walter conversed quietly, often about poetry. The poetry that Walter read aloud to them out there on the water was nothing like the poetry that Aaron had been forced to memorize in school, poems about the loveliness of trees. He started with several by Anne Sexton and T. S. Eliot, followed by a poem that he had driven all the way back to his house in Moorhead to retrieve because he had realized at breakfast that they needed to hear it. It was by a man named Richard Hugo, a poem that began so
beautifully Aaron had found himself in tears:
You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down.

Walter also asked questions, lots of them, his tone matter-of-fact: What had happened to Aaron's father, and did he know where his mother had gone, and did he think his life would shape up differently because of these factors? He asked Aaron what he planned to study in college, as if college were a given and the only thing left to be worked out was what Aaron hoped to do with his life. Aaron discovered that Walter was a good listener, and he found himself answering honestly.

“Did Rudy know about you, that, you know, that you're gay?” he asked Walter later, when he was just starting to figure this out about himself.

“I never told him in so many words, but I suspect he knew. Rudy is a very perceptive man,” Walter said. “Did you know he came out to the cabin one afternoon to talk to me about you?”

Aaron shook his head.

“Well, he did. He wanted my help getting you into college. He wasn't sure what I could do exactly, but he wondered whether there wasn't something, given my position at the university. He said he didn't want you stuck there like his daughter.” It had made Aaron's heart ache to picture Rudy doing this. “He's a good man, Rudy is, a kind man. It's probably why he drinks too much. There are some people that the world's just too much for, you know.”

“I didn't know,” Aaron had said. He was just eighteen, and there was so much he didn't know.

O
n the board, Aaron wrote the day's phrasal verb:
turn into.
He added a definition—“to change from X to Y; to become”—and beneath it, examples:

1. 
We
turned
the garage
into
a study.

2. He started studying more and
turned into
a straight-A student.

3. She
turned
her jeans
into
a pair of shorts.

Behind him, the students copied everything into their notebooks, which was always the case when they studied phrasal verbs. To truly understand English, they agreed, they had to know the difference between
turn into
and
turn in
. They sat in pairs writing sentences while Aaron circulated, checking their work. He read aloud what Chaa had written:
Tommy used to be a man, but then he turned into a gay.
The Thai boys laughed, except Tommy, who looked around for Aksu, worried that she might have overheard their teasing.

“You do know that gay men are still men?” Aaron said.

“Yes?” said Chaa. He sounded surprised.

Finally, it was break time, and the students turned on their cell phones and borrowed change from one another for the coffee machine. As Aaron passed the smoking balcony on his way down to the faculty room, he saw that the sliding door was ajar and that smoke was drifting into the hallway.

“Smoke travels,” he called to the two smokers, before slamming the door shut.

He recognized them, two young Japanese women who planned to remain in the class one level below his because they were afraid of him. “He looks too serious,” they had told his students, referring to his ties and the horn-rimmed glasses, his tallness and the severe part of his hair. The Thais had reported this to him gleefully.

The women began gesticulating. They pointed to the door, their mouths moving, and he pointed to his ear and yelled, “Louder.”

“Broken,” screamed the one on the right. She tugged on the door. Nothing. Aaron tugged. It was indeed broken, like everything else in this building.

“Okay,” he called. “I'll get help.” Instead of going downstairs to find Bart, he turned back toward the detective's classroom, assuming that a man who visited the smoking balcony with such regularity would be familiar with the door's idiosyncrasies. He had not actually met him yet, but they often nodded at each other down the hallway. The detective's door swung open just as Aaron reached it, and the two men collided, hard. Aaron extended his hand. “I'm Aaron,” he said.

“Bill,” said the detective, his grip unexpectedly loose. “Carpal tunnel,” he added, as though reading Aaron's mind. “All those years of writing out reports.”

“I was wondering whether you might have some advice regarding the sliding door on the smoking balcony?”

“My advice is ‘whatever the hell you do, don't close the damn thing.' ”

“Well, I've already done so—slammed it, in fact,” Aaron said.

Bill put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, jiggled it up and down. “Let's go take a look,” he said. Students had already gathered around the door, but they stepped back, no doubt reassured by Bill's capable appearance. “Yup, it's definitely off the track,” Bill confirmed. He turned to Aaron. “I remember seeing a toolbox in the basement when I got the tour—in the corner by the Christmas tree.”

Aaron understood that he had created the problem, which made retrieving the toolbox his responsibility. Generally, he avoided the
basement, a dark, low-ceilinged place used for storing extra desks and blackboards as well as the numerous holiday decorations of which Marla was fond—bats and leprechauns keeping company with Chinese lanterns and turkeys. It was also used for hosting school-wide parties, the only space big enough to accommodate all the students. They had begun the term down there, the teachers and students collectively welcoming the new year and the new semester, and because he was new, they had welcomed him also. He recalled how uncelebratory the event felt, the dirty windows and flickering fluorescent lights, the ceiling pressing down on them. Marla had run off copies of “Auld Lang Syne,” which they sang together, ruining for Aaron, possibly forever, a song that had always invoked in him a sweet nostalgia.

He made his way down the back stairs and paused to let his eyes adjust. He did not know where the light switch was, but he could discern the Christmas tree, which lay on its side like a giant tumbleweed. Near it was a pair of chairs, facing each other as though they'd been set up to facilitate an interrogation, an interrogation of the sort that required a dim, isolated, innocuous place. He stepped carefully over to the tree and saw the toolbox, just as Bill had described, but as he bent to retrieve it, he heard a low, throaty exhalation of air. It frightened him, the way that human sounds do when you think you're alone, and he jerked his head toward it.

There, almost close enough to touch, was a young man leaning back against a column. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was open wide, like that of a thirsty man trying to catch a drop of rain.

Perhaps Aaron made some small noise, or the boy simply sensed a presence, but his chin dropped and his eyes opened, and he was looking right at Aaron, each regarding the other with surprise. Just as quickly the boy looked down, though not before Aaron had seen the fear in his eyes. Aaron followed the young man's gaze, down to where darkness shrouded his body. From this darkness rose a form that became another human being, a man with black hair that stood on end as though mussed from a pillow or a lover's restless hands. It was Melvin.

*  *  *

Two stories up, in the well-lit faculty room on the second floor, it was easy enough to believe that he had imagined the whole thing, for there in front of him sat Felix eating a potato still steaming from the microwave while Kate passed around a bag of preserved plums, her weekly gift from a Japanese student who was concerned about her digestion. Eugenia was looking through a box of cassette tapes, and when she saw Aaron in the doorway, she said, “Aaron, do you have the
Lake Wobegon
tapes?”

“I have no interest in
Lake Wobegon
,” he said. He was tired of people assuming he did. Nobody asked why he was carrying a toolbox.

Even Taffy was there, sorting through magazines, no doubt in preparation for a cut-and-paste activity of the sort that introductory ESL teachers relied on, snipping out pictures of people and labeling them with straightforward adjectives:
HAPPY, SCARED, CONFUSED, EMBARRASSED.

“Taffy,” Aaron said, “may I speak to you in the hallway for a moment?”

He needed to tell someone what he had seen, to try to put into words the mix of emotions he had felt as he walked away from the two men. Taffy followed him out and stood with her hands on her hips. “What is it?” she asked in a voice that made it clear she had more magazines to sort through.

“Actually, it's nothing,” he said, put off by her tone, but then the words tumbled out anyway. “It's just that I went down into the basement to get the toolbox, and I came upon two students.” He held up the toolbox as though his story hinged on it.

“They were skipping class?” asked Taffy.

“I'm not sure.” This was a lie. Melvin had been sitting in his desk right up until break began, but noting this meant implicating him.

“You didn't ask? The basement is off-limits to students. You should've asked.”

“They were . . . busy.”

“Busy?” said Taffy loudly, as though she took offense at the notion of students being busy, but then, perhaps noting his discomfort, she said, “Busy how? Are you telling me that they were doing something down there?”

He nodded.

“Did you recognize them?” she asked.

He thought about the look of shame in their eyes, shame not just at being caught but at the need that had brought them to this moment.

“No,” he said. “It was dark. I didn't recognize them.”

*  *  *

The sliding door had been removed and propped against the wall. Bill and four students stood on the balcony smoking, as though being on the balcony were what mattered, the door itself inconsequential. The freed Japanese women regarded Aaron warily. He looked at his watch and saw that somehow only half an hour had passed since the break began. His students were filing back into the room, but Melvin, who never missed class, did not return with them. Nobody commented on his absence, perhaps because Melvin's absence felt much like his presence. Later, when the afternoon session began, he was back, sitting at his desk, not laughing or smiling or talking—in short, acting as he always did, which meant that there was no way to know whether what had happened in the basement had upset him.