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He lunged at me, grabbed, and twisted my ear savagely. “Yes, you are.”
“Why?” I asked, struggling against the pain. “Going to church isn’t going to make me what you think a man is, any more than going makes you a Christian.”
His slap was swift and stinging. I could feel a bruise rising. My skin was as sensitive as I was; another of my failings as a man. The cereal bowl fell from my hands and smashed on the stone floor; milk, like blood, flowed around my feet.
“Look what you done!” My grandfather lunged at me again.
I reached behind me and grabbed the Brown’s soda bottle that stood on the drain board waiting to be turned in for a penny. I smashed it against the cast iron sink. At that moment, I ceasedbeing a child, anyone’s child. Wielding the broken neck of the bottle, I taunted him. “Come on. Hit me again.”
My grandfather fell back a step; his mouth hung open a little. “I never thought I’d live to see the day a child of mine would raise his hands against me.”
I laughed a little. “I am no one’s child and certainly not yours. You have always beaten me as if I was a man. Today, if you raise a hand against me, I will kill you like a man.”
I could see my brothers gathered in the doorway to the kitchen looking confused and a little frightened. Still holding the bottle like a torch lighting a dark path, I slipped my backpack awkwardly over my left shoulder and picked up my suitcase. He seemed to notice my luggage for the first time.
“What?” he asked, confused, but he stepped to the side and my brothers parted, allowing me to pass between them. Outside, I threw the bottle to the ground and spit in the dust. I could see Jackson in his battered pickup truck waiting for me on the road at the edge of my grandfather’s property.
I retrieved the box I’d placed in the crush of corn plants clustered beside the driveway. In the box was all I had left of my parents: their wedding album, my father’s Henry Mancini albums and a half-empty bottle of my mother’s favorite perfume, Wind Song by Prince Matchabelli. I’d once had a Laguiole penknife with a rosewood handle that my father had given me the summer we moved to the farm when I was seven. His father had given it to him when he himself was seven. It was my most treasured possession. I’d kept it hidden with all my childhood treasures in a shoebox secreted under a loose floorboard beneath my bed; only my dad had known where I kept it. The morning after my parents died, I went to look for it, hoping it would bring me comfort, but it wasn’t in its hiding place.
I hoisted the box into the bed of Jackson’s truck, which already held his backpack, an old suitcase and two orange milk crates containing his collection of clocks. Friday night, after we’d gotten off work at Lewisohn’s, Jackson had parked at the edge of the woods so we could finalize our escape plan. After our plan was firm, he’d given me the moon and the stars in that truck bed. I threw my suitcase and knapsack next to his and walked around to the passenger door. When I got in, he reached out and rubbed my knee. I smiled at him, but neither of us spoke.
When we reached the outskirts of town, Jackson pulled onto the shoulder of the road. He threw the stick shift with its bulbous wooden head into neutral. He stared straight ahead. The sky was gray; the sun, visible along the rims of the slow-moving clouds, burned bright, making the very air glitter like metal; the road that stretched before us seemed less dusty than the one beneath us. His hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly the veins rose angry and green from his thin skin.
“Are you sure,” Jackson asked, “that we can do this?”
Through the side mirror, I could see the soot-blackened houses we were about to leave behind, the result of a populace who had, all at once, abandoned as futile the practice of whitewashing their fences and cottages and farmhouses under the constant assault of the factories two towns over, a veritable Mt Vesuvius that breathed soot into the air six-to-six, six days a week. Today, as every Sunday I could remember, a phalanx of grimy workers with their slowly blackening lungs moved in twos and threes and families to the graying steepled church to give thanks.For what?
For years, I’d seen them on Sundays when they filed into Reverend Jack’s church in their fraying Sunday best with their gray faces and black lungs; they brought with them the stink of the factory, reminding us, and themselves, that Monday was justaround the corner. I wouldn’t, I knew, see them again for a long time, if ever.
“I’m sure, “I said. “Wecando this.
Jackson nodded without looking at me and moved the truck into gear.
One of my most enduring memories is of a dog who lived on the farm. I suppose she was my grandfather’s dog, though he didn’t seem particularly fond of her. She was a nondescript black mutt, sweet as the day was long. She didn’t even have a name. She disappeared once for a week. One of my brothers found her after a neighbor complained of a stray black dog that had given birth in his barn. My brother led my grandfather and my other brothers and me to the neighbor’s barn. My grandfather gathered the puppies in a burlap flour sack to carry them back to the farm. Once back at the farm, he filled a large tin basin with water and pulling one black-and-pink pup from the pile of squirming newborns held it under water until the air bubbles stopped. He then invited each of my brothers to do the same. I hid in the hayloft stifling my screams in a bale of hay. When the last puppy had stopped squirming and been tossed into a pile with the other still puppies, our dog walked slowly over and nudged the pile of still-warm flesh that had seemingly been her life’s work, her pride and joy in a mostly joyless life. She turned and regarded my grandfather and my brothers, who stood still, pinned, and mildly alarmed by her baleful glare and guttural growl. Suddenly she turned away and walked out of that barn. She didn’t once look back. We never saw her again.
As Jackson pulled away, I looked at the receding farm in the rearview mirror. I realized that if the farm burned to the ground tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter to me because everythingI cherished—everything that was important to me—was in Jackson’s truck with me.
Monday, August 22, 1977, University City—As the road we were on became paved, and widened into two, then three lanes, and streetlights appeared along the shoulders, I began to relax. I imagined the camp folks sitting in their white panel van in the empty, dusty, weed-choked lot that passed for the church parking lot—no one drove to services, few having cars and most living within walking distance—beside the church. I began to imagine them falling in on themselves as if by Jackson and I evading their clutches, we’d managed to drop a house on them.
Around midday, we stopped to eat at a McDonald’s. We were hesitant, unsure; neither of us had ever eaten “fast food” before, but we were hungry. We stared up at the illuminated menu with its glossy photos of plump juicy hamburgers and something called chicken nuggets that didn’t look like any part of a chicken we’d ever seen. We ordered burgers and French fries that looked like long, soft pieces of balsa wood. It was the first time we’d ever eaten a meal that no one we knew prepared; that we didn’t know who the meat came from; that we ate a meal without vegetables, without a glass of milk.
We slept in Jackson’s truck last night at the edge of campus, which was still and dark by the time we arrived.
“Are you sure this is OK?” I asked Jackson. “Are you sureyou’re,OK? Do you need anything?” The calm I had felt as we left Locust Hollow behind now disappeared in the cramped confines of the cab of Jackson’s truck in this dark, unfamiliar city.
“You’re here,” Jackson said. “You’re all I need.”
Seconds later, his head resting on my shoulder, he was asleep. My pounding heart felt like it would punch a hole in my chest. His gentle, rhythmic snoring eventually calmed me, and I too fell asleep. I dreamt my heart had beat a hole in my chest and fallen out. Jackson caught the throbbing, bloody muscle in his hand and returned it to its place in my chest, sealing the opening by pressing his chest against mine. I woke to the rhythm of Jackson’s chest rising and falling against mine.
Friday, September 30, 1977, University City—We spent three days sleeping in the cab of Jackson’s truck. We showered at the university gym—my student ID allowed me and a guest to use the facilities—and we ate at a diner. Neither one of us had ever eaten in a diner before. I was amazed that you could order breakfast at any time and mostly ordered fat sunny yellow omelets stuffed with peppers and sausage like my mother used to make.
The people at student housing didn’t seem at all curious about our relationship, only wanting to get us “off the street,” going so far as to call the landlord and urging him to make an apartment immediately available to us. Our new home is a small, furnished, one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a crumbling Victorian rowhouse, which is missing a great deal of its gingerbread trim painted in a flaking, faded yellow that had probably once been as bright and promising as a new school bus on the first day of school. To Jackson and me, it was the Taj Mahal and Buckingham Palace rolled into one. Right after we unloaded our possessions, we went to Woolworth’s and bought towels and sheets for our full-size bed; everything else came with the apartment.
Jackson got a job in construction and another one delivering theWall Street Journalto office buildings and apartments downtown. My scholarship includes a work-study job that pays slightly more than minimum wage, so I now work at student housing twenty hours a week. If my grades are good at the end of the semester, I’ll be eligible to work more hours. I also got a job waiting tables a few evenings a week and Saturdays at a cuchifritos restaurant in the Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood that borders campus. I like the job a lot. The restaurant is much grander than the converted bus in Locust Hollow, with colorful lighting and big, flashy signs that are as enticing as the smells wafting into the street. It is always busy. But the smells, the sounds, the people, the menu—bacalaitos, morcilla, papas rellenas, jibaro en canoa—remind me of picking season, of Juan, of Rio.
Thursday, October 27, 1977, University City—This is heaven—though can someone like me who thoroughly rejects religion reliably write of heaven? But how else to describe this…freedom, this absence of judgment? No more hurried caresses or stolen kisses or scrambling out of bed lest we get caught. Affection is no longer forced to be circumspect or hidden altogether; sex, at all hours of the day and night, is as loud as it needs to be.
I realize this is to an extent a false freedom, like living in a zoo preserve that faithfully approximates your natural habitat but is still a confining enclosure. We still get disapproving glances, and it’s not like we’ll be going to city hall to get a marriage license. Still, it feels good to soar free. Even on clipped wings.
