The wilderness
a version of this story has been published in Jonathan Magazine, number 11. to read this and other stories by some great LGBT writers, go here: https://siblingrivalrypress.com
this story also appeared in Red Fez issue 91
https://www.redfez.net/nonfiction/essay-the-wilderness-732

“Why don’t you get out of the God damned house?” My mother barges into my room.  “You’ve been cooped up all day reading, on a beautiful day like this, with your nose in a book. It makes me nervous!”

She points her finger at me. She’s still wearing those pink rubber gloves from house cleaning.

 I toss the paperback on the bedspread.

“The life of Ben Franklin?” she reads from the cover “Go outside like any normal kid on school vacation,” she says, “go out and play ball or something.”

“I’m going.”

“Don’t give me that face, Mister,” she warns, “I’ve had a long day.”

“Okay.” I lace up my Keds and head past her to the stairs.

“Go out the front door, I just mopped the kitchen floor, and I don’t need you scuffing it up with those filthy sneakers.”

“I’m going to Robby’s,” I say.

“Good. I’m gonna go lie down and watch my stories for a while.”

My hand runs along the smoothly polished banister that smells like lemon polish. I sink into the plush gold wall- to -wall carpet as I pass through the living room. The pale green couch and ivory love seat flank an empty fireplace, like ghosts in the dark room. To keep the sunlight from fading everything, heavy drapes are shut tight.

Outside, the late Friday afternoon is blazing and bright. Our lawn is already tinged brown. It’s dry underfoot. The FOR SALE sign swings, it creaks on a gust of wind that feels damp and hot. I walk my bike across the street.  Mr. Mason is mowing his grass, an oblong of verdant green bordered by neat flowerbeds.  Petunias, pansies, and yellow summer roses droop in the drowsy heat. He nods as I came over, mops his brow. “Hot one today,” he says. His bare, sunburned arms are tattooed from his days with the Marines. He nods again, tucks his handkerchief in the front pocket of an old pair of Bermuda shorts.

“Is Robby home?” I ask

“He’s out back,” he says, and gets on with his work.

The yards, like the houses on Lilac Hill, are nearly identical to each other, with minor variations; flagstones, flowering dogwoods, an inground pool here and there, a useless gazebo like the one in front of the Kirby place, set the properties apart. The Mason’s patio is off a breezeway that connects the garage to the kitchen. In the shade of a striped umbrella, Mrs. Mason sits at the table doing the TV guide crossword puzzle, a ballpoint in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Next to her pack of Tareytons, a tall glass beads with sweat. “Well hello, stranger,” she says over her big sunglasses. “How’s your mom holding up?”

“Ok”

“You tell her to come over anytime, if she wants a little girl talk. I always keep a Sarah Lee in the freezer for when company comes over.”

“I will.”

“It’s too bad she didn’t get invited to the Andrews’ pool party tonight, I talked to Judy and she figured it was going to be a lot of couples, and your mom might feel a little out of place, considering.” She takes a sip of her drink. A trickle of perspiration makes its way down into the shadow of her cleavage. “We’re going, of course, Big Bob and me,” she goes on, “it’s not every year we have a big Bicentennial bash, ya know? Judy’s going all out, she’s got waiters in Revolutionary outfits, and fireworks, the whole nine yards. Everyone is going.” She drops her eyes. She crushes her smoke into the overflowing ashtray and lights another.

“Where’s Robby?”

“Up in his tree.” She points past the barbecue pit to the big leafy oak at the back of the property.

I climb up to the fort and give the knock.

“Come on in,” he says.

Robby and his dad built the tree house a few summers ago, out of spare lumber from Mr. Mason’s workshop. They’re both pretty handy. The two of them worked on it together for weeks. It’s pretty snug. Robby calls it his laboratory, where he does top secret experiments. He’s at the workbench playing with his chemistry set. “Check this out,” he says without looking up. He’s running a lighter flame up and down a test tube. A plume of purplish smoke curls around the low raftered room. “Don’t breathe it too much, it’s wicked poisonous,” he cautions.

“Cool”

“What’s up?” he says.

“My mom’s on the rag” I say.

“That blows”.

“Wanna do something?” I ask.

“Sure, let’s grab a Del’s,” he says, “it’s hot as the devil’s butt hole in here”

“Ok”

A few minutes later, we retrieve his bike from the shed.

“Have you heard from your dad?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing?”

 “I’m not supposed to talk about it”

“Ok, sure,” he shrugs.

When we pass my yard, he glances at the sign on the lawn. “It’s gonna be kinda weird when you move, not having you across the street anymore.”

“Yeah”

“My dad says you guys’ll probably get 60, maybe 70 thousand bucks for the house”

“Really?”

“Yea you’ll be rich.”  He laughs.

We hop our bikes and ride down the street. He’s got the new one, it’s shiny with slick treaded tires. Mine’s kind of rusty, the chain kept falling off, but he fixed it for me last week, so now it’s going pretty good. He’s talking about one of the nuns at Sacred Heart, where he went to elementary school, there’s this Sister Anthony that razzed him all last year. “I’ll be glad to be getting out of that hell hole,” he says, “and away from Monkey Tits.” In September, he starts at Bishop Allen, the private junior high. He’s stoked to go to the new place. “You’ll understand when you get to middle school,” he says, “you’ll see.”

On the corner of Hollyhock Lane is Rocky Cole’s house. He’s out on his front lawn hanging with Vinnie Macarone and Joe Ritoli.  “Hey FAGGOTTS!” Rocky yells out as we go by. They’re a few years older then us, in high school. Ordinarily, they’d chase us, but it’s too hot, and they’re too high from sniffing glue.

Robby flips them the bird.

“Look at the homos!” Vinnie says.

“You’re mom’s a fucking drunk, Mason!” says Joe.

“That’s a lie!” I say to them.

“What do you know, baby?” says Rocky, “your dad left  ‘cuz you’re such a cocksucker!”

“I heard he’s got a skank he’s living with in Scituate,” Joe says.

“Who can blame him?” says Rocky, “the old lady’s a lard ass!”

Vinnie chucks a lit M-80 toward us. It goes off and leaves my head ringing, but we are booking ass.

“Fuck off Cocky Roll!” Robby laughs over his shoulder.

We pedal up to the window at Del’s where we pool our pocket change for two large lemonades at 35 cents apiece, and a small pack of raspberry Twizzlers for another 15. Expertly, we chew off the ends of the licorice to use as straws.

“Brain freeze,” I say.

“You always drink it too fast,” he laughs.

“It’s good.”

“You wanna sneak into the Drive- In tonight?”  He runs a hand through his longish sandy blond hair, like he does whenever he’s planning something.

“Again?” I say. “We’ve seen The Omen three times already. It creeps me out”
“Chicken shit,” he says.

We kill some time there in the parking lot, talking about nothing, shooting the shit. The heat of the day steams off the hot black top. Soon, we are riding again, up Laurel Hill, pumping hard up the steep incline, fueled on sugar syrup, our T- shirts plastered to our backs with drenching sweat. At the crest we stop for a bit, panting. He pulls a smoke from the leather pouch hanging from his high rise handle bars “Wanna split it? I only got the one”

“Sure.”

He inhales deeply and hands it to me.  I put my lips to it where his just were, his spit still slick on the filter tip, it tastes like raspberry licorice, there’s the rush of nicotine, and it feels good.

   

                                                         

The neighborhood is easing into a golden summer evening. There is the whiff of smoke from backyard cookouts. People are sitting out on lounge chairs, chattering and laughing from patios. An endless whirr of sprinklers whisks across green lawns. Occasionally, firecrackers go off. American flags are fluttering from just about every house, little plastic ones are taped to mailboxes, and some are stapled to telephone poles.

We weave our way through a bunch of kids from school playing touch football at the end of Dahlia Drive. They have to stop when old Mrs. Murphy goes by in her big emerald two tone Buick with the tail fins, its polished chromework glares in the late sun. “That heap must be twenty years old, at least,” Robby mutters. Robby likes cars. He already has his eye on the Trans Am he wants his dad to buy him, when he gets his license in a couple years. “It’s gonna be fucking awesome,” he assures me. That’s what some dads do, they buy their kids cars, they build tree houses, they mow the lawn.

We glide under the trees, toward the woods, an acerage of undeveloped land that for us holds all the allure of a kind of wilderness. This is the place where just a few years ago we played games like Capture the Flag and Hide and Seek, games kids play.

The entrance to the woods is just ahead. Even in the daytime, it’s a little dark and a little scary. The place is haunted these days, since that evening the night after Christmas when they found Johnny Johnson hanging dead from the old Indian tree.

“He was strung out on LSD,” Robby says knowingly.

“What’s that?”

“Bad News” he says.

There is also an old junked car, buried in the underbrush, an ancient rusted Dodge. “That’s where Donna Johnson lost her cherry a bunch of times.” Robby says.

Donna is Johnny’s sister. “I heard from David Chapnick that for a quarter she’ll show you her panties, and for a dollar the sky’s the limit.”

I laugh although I have no idea what he’s talking about. I have never heard of cherries being lost, I have no idea what he means about the sky, but I laugh anyway.

We walk our bikes down the path, under the scrubby, stubby evergreens. The place is quiet and shaded. Fireflies are already winking in the green ferns. We pass the old Indian tree, and the relic car. We walk up to the rocks along the rise of a hill.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” he says.

“Does it bother you? The stuff they say about your mom?”

He’s looking down at the dirt. “Nah.” He kicks a rock into the brush.

“What about you?” he says, after a while. “What’s the story with your dad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’d he go, anyway? Don’t you wonder?”

“Sure. No one’ll say. They just fight whenever he’s around, and then he’s gone. Just gone.”

“Sucks,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“You think it’s true? He’s got a girlfriend?”

“Mmmm.”

I don’t want to talk about it any more. I’m glad when we’re just walking under the leaves, when all I can hear is the birds, and the insects droning in tall overgrown grass.

“You wanna horse around a little?” he says.

“OK”

For some time now we’ve been playing a new game. The first time was on a rainy random day, on the floor of the knotty pine paneled rec room in his basement. After helping ourselves to Mr. Mason’s liquor cabinet, we kicked aside the Monopoly board, and rolled around a while, touching each other. Since then, we don’t play Monopoly so much any more.

Without talking, we make our way to the spot we discovered, deep in the deep woods, high up Little Bear hill. There are construction trucks parked along the edge of the field, they’re planning to put up more houses and a mini mall soon. I follow him into the dense green place that is still our secret.

Afterwards, when it is over, when we are both quiet, someone down in May Field sets off rockets, and Roman candles. Everything has gotten dark blue, just past dusk. We watch the fireworks light up and fizzle out.  

“You think you’ll miss the old neighborhood?” he asks. For a second his face is illuminated, and I can see the spray of freckles on his nose. His eyes, brown with flecks of gold, are looking at me.

“I guess so,” I say.

“You probably won’t even remember any of this,” he says.

I shrug.

And then he kisses me. Just once. We stay there a while, not saying a word, not moving, barely breathing, his face still close to mine.

Nothing has changed in the shadowy woods, though something suddenly seems different, like when the barometer drops before a big storm. When we lie down together against the mossy rock, to look up at the new stars, the rain clouds block our view, darkening heaven. I think that this is what they must mean, when they talk about the limits of the sky.

Still, we stay a while longer, listening to the sounds of the wilderness, until it’s time for us both to go home.

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