Halfway Home (35 page)

This outcry of ours—so much lost, so much yet to be taken—was something a man could only raise with his own blood. Beyond what the fathers couldn't tell us, beyond desire, we made a common noise at last, high above the blank indifferent sea. Brian would leave, and I would die—all of this would happen. This crying in each other's arms was something we'd won the right to, by reason of pain and fear of time. We wept to be men—my brother the same as I, and I the same as my brother.

W
E ARE SPRAWLED ON A PAIR OF LOUNGE CHAIRS ON
the terrace, Brian and I, soaking up the last gold burnish of the sinking sun. The bluff is windless, no trace of the storm except the swooning smell of green rising off the lawn. I'm turned on my side with drowsing eyes, my cheek cupped in the hollow of my hand. I study my brother a few feet away. His shirtless torso glistens with a fine film of sweat, like an athlete oiled for an ancient game in a stadium. His red hair flames in the naked light. He's drinking a green bottle of beer, three empties on the grass beside the chaise.

I can't be certain how drunk he is, if at all, but he stares unblinking into the west, mesmerized by the phosphorous sheen of the sun on the water. Anyone else would surely be blinded by now. Brian endures the dazzle, a test of wills between him and the powers of the air. Yet it's myself who's most in danger here. For the sun knocks out my T-cells with withering precision, nuzzling my checkered flesh with kisses of melanoma. Robison has long insisted on a sunblock of SP-30 or better and shrouds of clothing besides, so vulnerable am I to the glare of day. But here I lie regardless, naked to the waist and aping my brother, caution flung to the winds.

I don't know how long we wept, clinging in the tower, but it felt like hours. First and last of course I cried about AIDS, and the cheating of all our lives. Then for Daniel and his exile, this part standing in for me and the childhood I never stop mourning. But somewhere in there, my face buried against my brother's neck, I sobbed for the lost promise of West Hill Road—the four of us trapped without a clue, the prison of our common blood. Even a tear for my father, his dead heart and his strangled fury, no self-knowledge from cradle to grave. It wasn't the same as forgiveness, but for once I pitied him. And just to hate him a little less was like having a knife pulled out.

The tears were wordless start to finish, more exact than words. When at last it began to abate, the two of us gasping to breathe again, we pulled away from our brothers' embrace. Yet there was no fear or shame in our touching anymore. We lingered on Daniel's narrow bed, cross-legged like a pair of kids on a raft, and recovered our equilibrium, knees grazing. The last wall of our alienhood, men from opposite planets, had tumbled down with the knowledge that we were both equally robbed. As for being shit on by life, it was something of a draw.

Thus the whole long battle between us—gay against straight, the surly pride and xenophobic curses—yielded at last to a treaty. We might have been two old men who couldn't even remember the country below the waist, except for a dull ache in the prostate. Our dicks were the least of it now.

So it isn't with any desire that I gaze across at him sleepily, drinking his beer. It's this brotherly feeling, all the dots connected, and I'm basking in it. I understand that Gray has made it possible, by overturning the hitherto immutable law of my separateness. Part of my languid mood is being out of the hospital, the relief of we-can't-find-anything having caught up with me and left me in a heap. Yet I'm bound by a most peculiar secret at the moment, something I dare not share with Brian.

Being happy.

My blubbering grief in the tower was real enough, but it's over. Brian's isn't. Perhaps because I've been miserable so much longer than he has, and now with the other shoe of my sickness always waiting to drop—time enough for all of that again tomorrow. But if the rest of the day is what I've got with my brother, I'm damned if I'll throw it away wishing it were more. This is without a doubt the most half-full the cup has ever looked to me. Maybe it's the dementia starting, turning me maudlin as an Irish tenor. At this rate I may go out grinning like Donna Reed myself.

"She's not a real nun, is she?" Brian asks abruptly. Not a word has passed between us since the first beer.

"Ex," I reply succinctly.

"I thought she seemed too smart," he says with a grunt of satisfaction. Not drunk, but definitely a small buzz. As far as I know he has never taken after our father in that regard, but the drunk gene is in both of us, an incubus of riot. "Who still buys all that crap anyway?"

The question hangs rhetorical. It takes me several seconds before I realize he's talking about Catholics. "Your wife, for one," I answer carefully, eliciting from Brian an even harsher grunt. "And pardon me, but aren't you a Prince of the Church yourself?"

He laughs. "That's just good PR, Tommy. Worked with the brothers at Saint Augie's. Works just fine in Hartford—where you still got a lotta micks in the legislature."

I'm bolt awake now, the muzziness shocked out of me like a plunge in the winter surf. "You mean—you don't believe—" I can't even think how to ask it, the territory is so vast. The virgin birth? The miracles? The nuns in grammar school hammering at us day after day that all non-Catholics would burn in hell? What had been the last straw for him?

He turns to face me, his eyes unsullied as an Eagle Scout's. "I believe in God, Tommy. I just don't believe in churches."

I nod dumbly. "We thought you were going to become a priest," I observe. Meaning my mother, who used to browbeat me with the specter of Brian's purity. I think she'd decided my father wouldn't be beating me senseless all the time if I was as lily-white as my brother.

Brian's still laughing. "Soon as I discovered my dick, I knew the priests and I were playing different sports," he declares, this man who used to cop the piety Oscar at Saint Augustine's, year after year. "But hey, I'm a born con man. I knew how to push their buttons and win for Jesus."

My turn to crack up. "Oh, you have no idea. The Brothers would
swoon
with desire when you were in uniform." Brian lifts his eyebrows in mild surprise, and I wonder how naive he can possibly be about all of this. "The monsignor must've needed a
fan
in the booth, for all those steamy confessions. Every Brother in the order burning to sit on Brian Shaheen's pole!"

"I doubt that," he scoffs dryly, tipping the bottle and draining the last of the beer. He lobs the bottle beside the others in the grass. "I swear, you think everyone's gay."

"Not you," I correct him swiftly, matter-of-fact and without a second thought. "But didn't you ever think you might be cockteasing those coaches of yours? Not
consciously,
but how could you miss the way they looked at you? All sweaty in their collars and chanting rosaries in the locker room." I'm starting to sound a little lawyerly, though I try to keep it light and teasing. I grip the arm of the lounge chair like a trapeze as I lean toward him expectantly.

Finally he shrugs, with a slight flush of something like embarrassment in his cheeks. "I guess a little," he drawls in reply.

Point won. I shiver with impatience, a thousand more questions to ask. The most intense discussion of high theology I've had since catechism class. "Brian, if I'd had your looks and your pitching arm, I would've whipped those priest queens up to a frenzy. But then I'm a shameless exhibitionist. And not one of 'em ever made a pass?"

Brian stretches an arm above his head, rolling the shoulder in the socket, always in training to pitch his lightning curve. His forehead crinkles with concentration. "Well, maybe a couple of times they'd massage a muscle a little too long. And Father Dan—JV hoop—was always wanting to check us for hernias. 'Not a job for the school nurse, men.' " The gelatinous brogue is pitch-perfect.

"Ick," I remark with distaste, imagining the bald and leering priest, round as a basketball himself, juggling the boys' gonads while they coughed. "No wonder straight guys get so creeped. Thank you once again, dear Lord, for the blessings of the closet."

"Mm," he murmurs, his mind somewhere else.

It's beyond ironic, to think I became such a bloody anti-Catholic, pugnacious to the point of unemployability, and all because my brother was an Irish saint. Now it turns out he's as damned as I am. I draw my knees up, hugging them with my arms, exhilarated by this whole exchange. Feel like a boy again, or perhaps for the first time, never having connected before to the give-and-take of buddies. No more hours in the hayloft reading.

Now that I have the opening, I want to know what it was like to grow up as a god. But before I can formulate the question, I hear him whisper beside me. I turn with a questioning look, and his eyes fall to the ground as he repeats himself. "What about us?"

I blink, smiling hopefully. "What
about
us?"

He pauses the length of a held breath, like a kid passing a graveyard. We lock eyes. "The fooling around."

I can feel the burn in my cheeks. Then I lift my shoulders in a deep shrug, except it comes across more like a squirm. My lips are pressed tightly together, not the easiest way to talk unless you're planning a career in ventriloquism.

Brian leans his torso forward off the chaise, his back making a sucking sound as it comes away from the plastic pad. "Tommy? You know what I'm talking about, don't you?" His voice is tense with apprehension, as if he fears to be left all alone with it, that my stroke has erased the memory.

"Sure," I mumble at last. But I have to swallow a snarl of petulant rage, furious that he's brought it up.

"I don't know if I made you do it, or if it was your idea."

My shoulders haven't dropped from the previous shrug. "Little of both," I say. "It doesn't matter." But his anxious eyes don't leave my face, searching for psychic scars, till it forces me to answer the question direct. "Don't worry, I wanted it."

The "it" we are trying to talk about is the spring of his junior year, after Janice Mulroney gave up Brian's dick for Lent and came back from an Easter retreat sporting Norman Spires's class ring. She was instantly branded a two-bit whore by Brian's crowd, but meanwhile the league's star pitcher was left high and dry at the top of the season. So many vast forces at work cannot help but lead to strange bedfellows.

"I knew that," Brian says gravely, hunched on the edge of the chaise, combing a nervous hand through his hair. "I knew I could use you. It was all because I was pissed at this girl..."

"Janice Mulroney," I pipe in helpfully, always a whiz at the tawdry details. "Look, Brian, it's no big deal. Please—it was practically the only action I had between twelve and twenty."

Brian stares at his hands. He's not in sync with my flippant tone, still groping his way in the dark. What are we talking about here? Maybe twenty-five blow jobs between March and June, figure twice a week, and always the Friday night before the league game. After lights out, though we could still hear the old man downstairs clinking among the Seagram's bottles. The first time admittedly had been a little rough, Brian pinning me, shoving my head and slamming in till I gagged. But after that—well, I thought I took to pleasuring with quickening expertise.

Yet it's true, the whole scene would always pass in utter wordless silence, only the barest grunt as he exploded in my throat. And never a hint the next day that anything whatsoever had transpired. Secret as a dream, like Cupid visiting Psyche as she slept.

"I'd be crazy for it," Brian says now, "and then afterward I'd hate myself. And then I'd hate you."

I cluck my tongue. "So Catholic."

"But don't you see," he continues earnestly. "It made us stop being brothers."

I guess. The whole thing ceased without warning, the night before the league playoffs. Next day Brian was carried off the field on the shoulders of his team, a roar of cheering that shook the whole Connecticut Valley. The party went on for two days, the rowdy micks of Chester setting fires in a thousand trash barrels. And Brian the hero ended up scoring with the next awestruck girl of his dreams, Ann Waits with the thirty-six knockers. End of Cupid and Psyche.

"Ace, it doesn't matter," I repeat gently, reaching to pat his arm. "I needed to go it alone after that. It wasn't just you I was different from. It was
everybody."
My beaming face brims with reassurance, but my brother's downcast eyes are full of fret and melancholy still, for he can't let go of the mess we left a millennium ago. "Besides, there's a whole lot worse initiations than sucking your brother's baseball bat. Take my word for it. We're not going to hell for
that."

He looks down at my hand on his arm, then covers it with his own, prodding my fingers apart till we are intertwined. This is altogether more intimate than sucking his dick ever was—or anyone else's, come to think, till the last few days with Gray. When he lifts his eyes they are shot through with glints of a heartbroken tenderness. It's the aftermath of losing Daniel, though I'm more aware of this than he is. For Brian the guilt over me and his son is seamless, sins of pride, and he still believes in a God that punishes, church or no.