Authors: Brandon Shire
In a sudden jolt of movement he grabbed his pencil and a yellow slice of origami paper from his pocket. It was so bright and fresh that it was like sunshine bursting from his clothing in this dark alley. He paused thoughtfully for a moment and began a hasty scribble.
Amazed that he was writing outside of the cemetery, I looked on from his side, stretching my neck to see what he wrote, and to see if he wrote it with as much passion as he did with the verse he left for Lisa.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were- I have not seen
As others saw- I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken my
Heart to joy at the same tone;
All that I lov’d, I lov’d alone.
He pursed his lips a moment,
as I recognized Poe’s work,
then in another burst of motion,
he
folded a paper daisy in his hands and let it flutter to the ground. It was the only unavoidable point of light in this whole visage of doom.
Without a word he took my arm and led me out of the alley. Across the street a small cove of bushes marked the end of a park. He led me there and pointed back at the alley with a hushed reverence, settling in for an extended wait as I stood and looked at him.
I wanted to ask what we were waiting for, but Breece did nothing without a purpose, so I sat beside him and waited. A little while later, the blemished truth of the alley’s purpose became clear.
He was thin and willowy, young; the fragile line of his jaw nodding furtively to the older man beside him. I had seen the curve of that slender face, the trail of those delicate hands in a thousand faces at Sanctuary and immediately got up to stop it.
Breece grabbed my arm and shook his head. “It won’t do any good. He is what he is. Now watch.”
The boy’s cheek had a smear of dirt on it, but for that, and the calculating brown of his eye, he could have been on his way to school. He looked around, paused his gaze at our bush, and suddenly stepped away from the man; a quick stab of shame slapping his face as he met my eyes through the leaves. His patron began to move off immediately, his own senses alert to the boy’s instant apprehension.
With a quick look of obstinate determination, the boy shot out his hand with a light touch on the man’s forearm. He turned, a childish look of trust and yearning on his face, and nuzzled against the man’s hand in a coquettish move of assurance.
The trick was helpless against him; against the soft, low, breathless kiss he put on his fingers. He rubbed the silk of the boy’s lower lip with his thumb and allowed himself to be led into the lair.
In fifteen minutes the man returned to the mouth of the alley, his face slightly disheveled and his hand quaking as he realigned his clothing and hurried off.
“Quick,” Breece said as he motioned me up. He set off at a brisk pace in a direction opposite the trick and suddenly whirled and began walking casually back toward the alley, chiding me with a look as I straggled along behind him in perplexion.
Breece’s motive was still unknown to me when the boy stepped from the alley, the paper daisy clutched tightly in his hand; his eyes searching the bushes we’d just left. His expression had changed from a sensuous ache into a countenance of desolate need. He glanced at us, a quick sneering dismissal churning his features, and let his eyes fall back to the paper daisy in his hand.
He opened it slowly, so as not to tear its careful fabrication, and read it.
As we passed I looked into his eyes and saw, not the bane of cynical indifference, but a debilitating sorrow built on self-reproach. I could have screamed at Breece. I’d seen this a thousand times over at Sanctuary, and that thought only solidified when I watched a tear slip from this child’s eye, mix with the dirt on his cheek, and fall thick and brown beside my foot.
Breece saw it too and immediately grabbed my arm and propelled me along until we rounded the nearest corner.
I stopped and jerked my arm free. “God damn you to hell!” I screamed at him.
Breece put a finger to his lips, tapped at it and studied me.
“Love isn’t an object in a window, Charles. It’s something hidden in a shadow, discovered in a damp corner where you’d least expect it.”
“Christ! Then why not tell him that?” I demanded.
“Anything you put in front of that boy would be rejected. And if not rejected, then it would be misconstrued as an advance.”
“He’s too young…” I began.
“Is he?” Breece interrupted, unflustered by my determination to make it true. “He’s a thief of emotions, Charles. You’ve seen them before. He will take and take and take and never give. And never apologize for it, not even to himself. His tears are his only tribute to the pointless guilt he racks himself with, and for that reason he cannot give.”
He put a gentle hand on my shoulder and looked at me earnestly. “He’s a hostage to his own humiliations, Charles. He fears anything better.” He looked deep into me, pushing his message into my very soul. “Our perception comes from inside. We see the world as we see ourselves.”
“What about your notes?”
He shook his head sadly, dropped his hand and looked off into the distance. “He’s gotten used to his disappointments, Charles; draws them on himself. Unhappy if he is happy, satisfied with being sad. He has yet to learn not to cling. He’s afraid of being alone and yet also afraid that companionship equates with failure and more pain.”
He took me into his gaze again. “And so he returns to the same trough of desolation again and again; drinking the same bitter cocktail that has comforted him this long time.”
“Like me,” I answered, dropping my gaze to the sidewalk.
“Like you,” Breece answered quietly.
He came in slowly, his street rags gone and replaced by a crisp jeans and a white shirt; his hair and beard were trimmed down to professional perfection. If not for the weathering on his hands and face, I wouldn’t have recognized him.
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me as he helped me to my feet. “I see you’ve settled right back in,” he said with a shake of his head.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, blotting my lip with the handkerchief.
“Ending this,” he said, looking directly at Charlotte. It was a challenge, nothing more, nothing less. Charlotte recognized it as such and raised a single amused eyebrow, a small grin on her face.
Jarrel snorted. “It’ll end when this bitch dies,” he said in an explosion of bitterness. But there was an abyss of unvoiced emotion behind those words and we all saw it written in large letters in his face; a hungering for belief, a deep yearning for conclusion, and when he looked at Breece, a surge of the cruel resentment of abandonment.
Sylvia stepped from the doorway and somehow enfolded the big man protectively in her embrace. She glared at all of us, daring us to toss even a hint of cruelty his way.
“Will it?” Breece asked him gently. “Will it, when you don’t even know why?”
Jarrel’s face grew dark and hard. “There is no forgiveness,” he said, encompassing all of us.
Breece nodded and let out a long sigh, he would not be forgiven his childhood mistakes either. He looked at me for a long moment and turned to Jarrel.
“No forgiveness; maybe just the same understanding; the same “why” you offered Charles.”
Sylvia looked up at her husband, saw the hesitation there and nodded to him. “Okay,” he answered after a space of silence.
The movement beyond the door caught my attention, as it did Penny’s. We were all in the room now, or so we thought until Breece called out over his shoulder.
“Manuel,” I whispered as he entered. He was almost a decade older, like I was, but he still looked the same. Loose white New Orleans clothes, a hard brown body, and the deep dark gypsy features of his Latin heritage. He must have been freezing in this weather.
“Charles?” he asked as he looked at my vagrant’s attire.
“Oh Christ,” Charlotte snorted. “Did you bring Penny a nigger boy too?”
My rage found its focus again as I turned on her. “I know your pathetic little secret, bitch. So shut the fuck up.”
Charlotte’s eyes twinkled, but she said nothing.
I turned back to Breece, nodding at Manuel as I asked him my questions. “How? Why?”
“There was no place else to go after Mrs. Massey’s, Charles. I knew you’d come back here.” He glanced toward Manuel. “Finding him was the easy part. Now, the hard part, letting go, is up to you.”
(One week prior)
I met Breece and Cleat by the railroad tracks, a small breath of winter wind rustling the dry grass as we walked the rails. We watched the sky, commenting on the winter storm we saw coming in, when Breece suddenly proclaimed that he saw the virtue of forgiveness within me.
I stopped and looked at him, dumbfounded that he could voice such hypocrisy after nearly five years together on the streets. He knew everything about me, and yet he stood here about to give me the same lecture that had made me walk away from so many others.
“Loss is a lot like truth, Charles. Eventually it clears all obstructions. It has to. Loss is inevitable. We all lose someone at some time. If we think otherwise, we’re just inventing someone to blame.”
“I have someone to blame.”
He looked at me for a full moment. Then turned and started walking down the tracks without another word.
Two days later, when I walked through the gates of the cemetery for our morning chat, Breece stood in front of Lisa’s stone with a full bouquet of real roses. I was shocked, even more so when I approached and saw the tears streaming down his face.
“Nor’easterner coming in,” I said awkwardly, staring up at the still dark clouds.
“We’re leaving,” Breece said, his voice as small and flat as the crisp air around us.
“We are?”
He nodded remotely and turned his eyes to me. “It’s time to end this, Charles. It’s time to move on. I know being with me and tossing all these petty taunts at your family has made the harshness of life less real somehow, but it’s time for you to go.”
“Where?”
He looked at me with such tenderness that my defiance nearly crumbled; until he spoke. “Go back to New Orleans, Charles. Go back to Manuel.”
“Have you lost your fucking mind? That was ten years ago. He’s probably had hundreds of fags run through his bedroom by now. How could you possibly suggest that?”
He looked at me. “Because I know you, Charles. I know the draw you put on people. But it’s time to stop being afraid of being loved and understand that you’re worthy of being loved.”
“This is such a load of shit. I’m tired of hearing these bullshit soliloquies and postulations. This is my life, not some fucking drama.” He was dismissing me; nothing more than that, nothing less.
“The life you turned into a drama,” he answered back. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
“I don’t think so.”
He touched my arm lightly. “Please.”
I followed him, stopped, followed him again, then stopped again, determined to go nowhere. Eventually he got me to the destination I had avoided more than sought in all the years we’d travelled the streets together. Robert’s grave.
“Why?” I asked him. “Why’d you bring me here?”
“It’s time, Charles. Charlotte’s dying.”
“How the fuck could you know that?”