“Ya, okay. Shoot.”
“That friend of yours who passed away. Tom. He into anything, I dunno, for want of a better term—weird? Such as fortune telling, magic…anything of that nature?”
Victor gave me a long, wondering look. He shook his head and laughed. “Oh, hells yeah. Didn’t Glenn ever tell you? Man, we all got into that shit. Tarot cards, mainly. But, I really dug cultural anthropology. Those dudes get into spooky situations. And the poets of yore. Keats and company. Can’t read the classical poets without coming across funky ideas. Anyhow, the whole point of college is to experiment. Did I ever!”
“Anything heavy?”
“Like black magic? Voodoo? We joked around, but no, nothing heavy. Tommy boy was extra flakey. Dane and I tried astral projection with him and this Deadhead girl. Lawanda. Tommy kept cutting up until we quit and Dane went and scored some weed to keep him quiet. What about you? Are you a true believer?”
“I’m a theorist. Thing is, I’ve been studying that guide book we got in Seattle.”
“I seen that, girlfriend. A hoax, I’m sure. I bet you anything it’s a novelty gag. Somebody printed a couple dozen of them, like pamphlets, and scattered them to the winds.” I considered enumerating the reasons his theory didn’t hold water. The book materials were too expensive to suggest a joke, its articles and essays were too complex. I refrained because my tongue was getting thick from the booze and also because I wanted him to be correct. He said, “What’s Tommy got to do with the book?”
“Not a damned thing. Popped into my head for some reason. You didn’t care for Tom much, huh?”
“He was cruel to me. Dane and Glenn were his boys. None of us called him Tom, by the way. In fact, saying it aloud gives me chills. His father called him Tom. Used to beat his ass, or something. Dude was touchy about that. He’s in my dreams a lot since the accident.”
“That’s understandable. You should get some grief counseling if you haven’t.” Victor rubbed his bald head and gave me another look. “But I didn’t like him.” I said, “Doesn’t matter. He’s part of your life. In those dreams—what’s he want?”
“He doesn’t want anything. He moves in the background like a ghost. That makes total sense, though. The irony! I’m at a party with Dane. The party’s in a posh Malibu house, one of those places that hangs over a cliff, and the host is my second grade teacher, except he’s actually a cinematographer, or a screenwriter named Rick or Dick. He’s got a star on the boulevard. I mingle with all sorts of people I’ve known. Weird combinations of grade school classmates and high school sweethearts, janitors, the chick who used to pour coffee at an all-night diner on the corner, a guy who dealt weed from the back of his El Camino when I lived in North Portland, some hookers who hung out near my friend’s apartment, and famous dead people—Ginsberg and Kerouac; Johnny Cash and Natalie Wood. Lee Van fucking Cleef. Then I’ll spot Tommy in a corner or on the deck, maybe lurking behind some bushes. Sometimes he’s watching me and I’ll try to go talk with him. He disappears before I get there.” Victor’s diamond ring sparked like fire.
I knew he was lying because of how he leaned away from me. Not wholesale lying; some of it was true. The ice had disappeared. I signaled for another drink. My lips were numb; always a bad sign. My forehead was cold and that meant I was afraid. I thought about Tom and the beetle and the pentagram in Appendix B of
Moderor de Caliginis.
I thought about the rough pentagram I’d carved into my desk with a penknife. I’d done it without thinking and covered it with the keyboard afterward, ashamed. This double shot didn’t last long either.
“How’d he die? Really.”
“Waterskiing.”
“Come on, man.”
Victor glanced toward the door before signaling the bartender. “I need another one.” He waited until a fresh drink was in hand to continue. “Look, I wanted to let you in on this the other night. We invented the waterskiing story.
Dane
invented the story. I think he and Glenn have convinced themselves that’s what actually happened. Ah, Dane’s gonna wring my neck. We agreed to let it be. Tommy fell into a sinkhole. We’d camped in the hills—a couple of miles from here, in fact—and were hiking some trail. A lot of it blurs, you know? Traumatic stress syndrome, or whatever. One minute Tommy was behind me, the next he was gone. The hole wasn’t much. I doubt he ever even saw it. Rescue teams came the next day, but the thing was too deep and too unstable. The proverbial bottomless pit. They didn’t recover the body. I admit, me and Dane and Glenn freaked. After we finally got our shit together, we didn’t talk about it at all. First time somebody asked, Dane smiled and told them the skiing whopper. Couldn’t believe my ears. I didn’t argue, though. I went along with it. Except, when Glenn was telling you…frankly, that shocked the hell out of me. You two are serious. You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“That’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. Victor nodded. “Pretty awful. Thomas didn’t suffer, at least. Poor bastard.”
“You didn’t see him fall?” I don’t know why it occurred to me to ask. “He fell. No other explanation. I doubt the guy slipped into the bushes and faked his own death. Living in Maui under an assumed name…nah.”
“I’m kinda puzzled why you guys still want to go camping after an experience like that. Me, I’d burn my hiking boots and backpack in a nice bonfire.”
“Don’t be silly. We’ve gone camping a half-dozen times at least. Honestly, I see it your way. Dane and Glenn—those two are macho, macho, macho. What happened to Tommy just made them more bullheaded and foolhardy. Dane wants to go tramping the Indonesian backwoods next year, or the year after. Please, God, no. Snakes, spiders, diseases. I might take a pass.”
“Uh-huh, and he’ll wind up hitting on some eighteen-year-old stud-muffin islander and blame it on the booze and loneliness.”
“Ha, yeah. He’d actually blame it on me, if he cheated. Which he wouldn’t. He’s well aware I carry a switchblade.”
“You carry a switchblade?”
“In my sock. Not that I’d use it. I’m too pretty to fight. Although, if D. decided to fuck around, I might make an exception for his balls.”
I’d had enough. My body was Jell-O. Victor and I leaned on one another as we walked out of the bar and into the elevator. He gave me a sloppy goodnight kiss that landed on my ear as we parted ways. I crawled under the covers and slept, but not before I spent a few unhappy moments envisioning Tommy lying in subterranean darkness, his legs shattered. He screamed and screamed for help that wouldn’t arrive. I said,
“Yes, for the love of God.”
7.
Sequim (pronounced
Skwim
by the locals) was lovely that summer. The town rested near the Dungeness River at the heart of a shallow basin of the Dungeness-Sequim Valley and not far from the bay. Fields of lavender and poppies and tulips dominated the countryside. There were farms and mills and old, dusty roads that wound between wooden fences and stands of oak and birch and poplar trees. Raymond Carver wrote a poem about Sequim. I’d never read that one.
Our merry band rolled into town after dark and, since Sequim was the kind of place that locked its doors at sundown, we proceeded directly to the bed and breakfast—a cute two-story farmhouse—where Glenn had rented our rooms. The proprietors were an elderly couple named Leland and Portia Teller. Mrs. Teller fixed us a nice dinner despite our being three hours late. Baked salmon, steamed carrots, sourdough bread, and ice cream and black coffee for dessert. After dinner, we sat on the front porch in a collection of rockers and a swing, and smoked cigarettes. Glenn shared one with Dane. They reclined on the swing and giggled like teenagers. The night was muggy and overcast. Lights were off all over town except for the neon flicker of a bar several blocks down and across the parking lot of a community baseball diamond.
It was a good thing I hadn’t been drinking because watching Glenn casually indulge in a habit we’d mutually conquered at great physical and mental anguish ignited a slow burn in my chest. Were I drunk and vulnerable, God knows what I’d have done—wept, cursed him, slapped him, walked away into the night and disappeared. A half-dozen times I opened my mouth to say something sharp and ill-tempered. I mastered the impulse. I knew how Glenn would react if I confronted him. He’d laugh and play it as a joke. Then we wouldn’t talk for the rest of the trip.
I bit my tongue and moved to the opposite end of the porch and counted lights. Small towns disquieted me with their clannishness, their secretiveness, how everybody interacted as an extended, dirt-beneath-the fingernails family, how they scurried into their modernized huts as the sun set. A city boy was always a stranger, no matter how much money he spent, or how much he smiled. Being gay and from the wicked metropolis wasn’t a winning combination with country folk.
Later, tucked as near the edge of the bed as possible, I studied the cover of the
Black Guide,
entranced by the broken ring. What was the significance? Its thickness, the suggestion of whorls, brought to mind images of the Ouroboros, the serpent eating its tail. This wasn’t the Ouroboros. This was more wormlike, leechlike, and it disturbed me that it wasn’t eating its tail. The jaws, the proboscis, the shearing appendage, were free to devour other, weaker delicacies.
8.
The next day marked the opening celebrations of the Lavender Festival, an event that included a downtown farmers’ market and fair, and a bus tour of the seven major lavender farms in the area. None of us were lavender aficionados, yet we’d all enjoyed the film
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
, while Victor and I had also read the novel by Süskind.
There were two buses ready to ferry us around the area. I was grateful for the tinted windows and air conditioning as the temperature had already climbed into the nineties by eleven a.m. The sun hung low and blazed hellishly, but, secure in our plush seats behind dim glass, we laughed. Glenn surprised me by holding my hand. The bus was crowded with senior citizens and a smattering of sunburned couples and their raucous children. Nobody paid us any mind, nor did I think they would; however, his lack of customary reserve took me off guard. I accepted his overture as further rapprochement for hurting my feelings by smoking with Dane. Obviously he wished to appease my jealousy by jumping at the idea of the farm tour.
The tour was organized in the manner of a wine-tasting. We spent the long, insufferably hot day visiting restaurants and observing demonstrations of lavender’s multifarious uses in the culinary arts. The traveling show wound down late in the afternoon and we loaded into the Land Rover and sped off in search of booze. The Sarcobatus Tavern was closest, and not too crowded despite the numerous tourists wandering the streets.
A half-dozen college-aged guys occupied a table near the bar. Clean-shaven, muscular, decked in regulation fraternity field attire—baseball caps, sweaters, cargo pants, and athletic shoes. There were a lot of empty bottles on the table. Clearly out of their element and heat-maddened, a couple of the kids gave us hard, bleary stares. “Damn it,” I said. “What?” Glenn said, although he apparently noticed them too because he squeezed my elbow, then stepped away from me. Dane actually said hello to the group in a loud, gregarious tone. A burly kid wearing a Washington State University Cougars cap said something unfriendly and his friends clapped and jeered. Dane winked and flipped the double bird to each of them (“—and you, and you, and you, and you too, cutie pie!”) with exaggerated gusto, and while the college boys fumed and sulked, he ordered a round of beers that we carried to the opposite corner of the tavern near a pinball machine with its cord pulled out of the wall.
“Great Scott,” Glenn said a few moments after picking up a stray newspaper and scanning the headlines. It still amazed me that my lover seldom actually swore by means of shit, or asshole, or that hoary crowd-pleaser, fuck. No, with Glenn it was always hell, damn, holy cow, and Great Scott, and, on special occasions, jeepers and Zounds. I wasn’t fully privy to the origin of this eccentricity, except to note it had to do with a fondness of Golden Age comics and an aversion to his father’s egregious addiction to cursing, which I gather had been a subject of lifelong embarrassment. “Ten shot dead at a cantina in Ciudad Juarez. Two guys in motorcycle helmets ran in and opened fire with submachine guns. No leads. Police suspect it’s connected to drugs…” We all snorted derisive laughter at his humor. Dane said, “Man, I really liked vacationing in Mexico. No way, Jose. That isn’t any place for a gringo these days.”
“It’s not any place for
Mexicans
,” Glenn said. “Eleven thousand people killed since 2006 via drug violence. I think you might be safer signing up for Iraq.”
“Nonsense— Cancun is safe as houses, as the Brits say,” Victor said. “Um, sure, of course Cancun is safe,” Glenn said, “but Cancun isn’t Mexico. It’s an American college resort. Home away from home of damn fool tourists and yon Neanderthals.”
“The hell you say!”
“Cancun’s
technically
Mexico, just not the
real
Mexico.”
“What about Cabo?”
“Fake Mexico.”
“I wanna Corona,” Dane said. “Hey, barkeep, four Coronas. A ripe lemon wedge this time, for the love of Baby Jesus. Now, friends, let us weep for poor old May-he-co.”
We drank our beers and decided the hour had come to mosey out of town. I went into the restroom and pissed and when I returned only three of the frat brothers were still hanging around the tavern. Music from outside throbbed through the window glass. I found everybody else in the parking lot, a fist-fight already in progress. Dane was on one knee, pressed against the wheel well of a truck tricked out with oversized tires and radio antenna. The truck’s headlights were on, its door was open and radio speakers boomed “Four Kicks” by The Kings of Leon. Cougars-cap and two of the other guys stood in a semicircle and were punching him in the head. His scalp and nose ran with blood. Darkness had fallen and his blood flowed black in the neon lighting.
I lunged and Glenn caught my arm. “Don’t get in his way, baby.” Dane bellowed and surged to his feet, scattering his opponents. He slapped Cougars-cap on the ear. While the kid held his ear and shrieked, Dane snatched the antenna off the truck and began whipping all three of them. He grinned through a mask of gore, cocking his forearm behind his neck and then slashing in an elegant diamond pattern. The dying sun limned him in gold. He was a Viking god exacting retribution on his foes. The hair on my arms prickled and I gaped in awe. Then Glenn yelled and I turned and partially blocked a golf club swung at my head. The other three frat boys had followed us—Glenn rolled around on the ground with the guy who’d tackled him. Another went after Victor, who adroitly fled behind the Land Rover. I had a moment to admire at the lightness of his step. The golf club made a
thwock!
as it struck my upraised arm. The pain cranked a rotor in my brain and turned operation over to the lizard. I laughed with rage and joy and impending lunacy.