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Prologue
Oren Strange walked intoAbattoirand sniffed the air. The former slaughterhouse may have been renamed and refurbished, but it still stank of violence and agony and blood. Sawdust, which covered the floor, swirled about his feet as he took reluctant steps forward. Paper streamers, purple and white—his school colors—hanging from the low ceiling, tickling his shoulders, felt like ghosts brushing past.
Why was he here, he wondered again. Because of Rio, of course. He’d confessed his secret, and its release had unexpectedly opened a door he hadn’t known he’d held the key to. Now that he was here, all he had to do was walk through it. The question was, could he? If he hadn’t told Rio his secret, Rio would never have asked him to come. What more, Oren wondered, did Rio want from him? Why was he so eager to see him after all these years?
Had his life not recently fallen, unexpectedly, apart, he wouldn’t have found himself here at this reunion, ready to step through that newly opened door. Oren walked up to a table just beyond the entrance where plastic-encased name tags rested in alphabetical order.
“O Strange One,” a voice suddenly boomed as Oren studied the display looking for his name. The old hated moniker that so many had thought such a clever play on his name. The voice was attached to the dense heavy body of a former athlete who had let himself go to seed, surrendering to age, gravity, and too much beer; the muscle had dissolved into fat and settled around his middle. Lidell Holloway.
“You look exactly the same,” Lidell boomed. “Still skinny as a rail.”
“I’m sorry,” Oren said. “Do I know you?”
Immediately, the bravado left Lidell and was replaced by a kind of bitterness, for Oren had reminded him that he was no longer the star athlete, wasn’t otherwise anyone worth remembering. Lidell abruptly slunk away muttering to himself. His voice was so low, but Oren heard what he said: “Stuck up, citified faggot.”So, nothing has changed, Oren thought to himself.
After their exchange, doubt assailed Oren once again and arrested his progress. He stood still trying to adjust to the room’s heat, the cigarette smoke, the cloying scent of White Diamonds. Why was he here? Was he, like Jackson, just trying to rewrite his story with a different leading man and a happier ending?
Then, from the center of a gaggle of twittering, giggling women wearing their Sunday best and “good” bras, gold crosses hanging around chicken necks plunging and twisting between pushed-up bosoms like the agony of Christ, he heard a rumble of laughter; like echoes of thunder up at the quarry, it went on and on. It was the most absurd sound in the world, a laugh he recognized. Rio was here, as he’d promised he would be. Whatever else had changed about Rio, his laugh was the same. Oren found that reassuring. Now the only remaining question was, did he have the courage to step through that open door that invited like a portal into another dimension?
Oren took his name tag off the table and shoved it in his pocket.
Book One:
1975–1981
Red (1975)
Monday, January 6, 1975, Locust Hollow—His name is Rio. He has creamy brown skin, and his small shapely head is crowned with loose unruly curls that refuse to be tamed by cut or comb; his eyes are the color of the smoke from a California wildfire. He’s slim but broad-shouldered; he’s lean and angular, sharp as the blade of a new knife. Having been born in Mexico, English is not his first language; he has the faintest accent. He is musical, but there is something of the poet in him, too. He seems always to be laughing. Like erupting lava, his laughter flows easily, encompassing everything in its path. Looking at him—and I can’t seem to stop looking at him—I understand myself for the first time; I want to be him.
Since I can remember, I’ve admired and envied my classmates, boys who were handsome, muscular, athletic, manly despite their childish ways, even as I preferred kneading dough in a warm kitchen or scrubbing copper pots until they shone to hacking through ice to capture fish comatose from the cold or wringing the necks of defenseless chickens too dumb to close their mouths during a rainstorm.
I spent all of freshman year and last term wanting to be like Rio, to look like him, to speak with his deep voice, to attract friends and teachers’ praise. To have his confidence. He is so at ease with the knowledge that he is good-looking that he seems the slightest bit cocky, which doesn’t detract at all from his allure. Rio. I’d thought I simply wanted to look like this handsome boy I admired,behim; I wanted to be strong and handsomeand manly. It wasn’t until I saw Rio, who was wearing a tight red polo shirt in homeroom this morning—he was in Mexico over Christmas break, so he is darker, and he seems to have gotten handsomer and more muscular while he was away—that I realized I don’t want tobehim so much as I want to bewithhim. It was, I realized suddenly, that simple and that profound. I want to touch him, to feel his hands around my waist. I want to feel his warm breath on my neck. I want to press my lips against his, to hold his hand as we walk down a deserted country road. I want to swim naked with him up at the quarry.
With this sudden clarity, I now understand why I would rush home from school to catch the four-thirty movie whenever it was Elvis Presley Week. I hadn’t understood why I loved watching him, with his slicked-back pompadour, his long body sheathed in tight shirts and form-fitting pants, and the sound of his voice. Mesmerized, I’d watched his movies:Viva Las Vegas;Jailhouse Rock;King Creole;Blue Suede Shoes;Blue Hawaii. Later, I’d been equally enthralled by David Cassidy inThe Partridge Family, with his flowing protein-enriched hair and his skintight bellbottoms.
Monday, April 14, 1975, Locust Hollow—I had my first wet dream last night. Not surprisingly, it was about Rio. Much of it wasn’t clear, but he held me tightly against him with a viselike grip. I couldn’t get away, but I didn’t want to either; instead, I was content with the rubbing together of our bodies, his breath mingling with mine.
They told us about wet dreams, calling them “nocturnal emissions” in sex-ed class, but our teacher made them sound akin to wetting the bed and thus shameful for a teenager to fall prey to. The viscous stickiness was nothing like pee andits expulsion was far more pleasurable than the simple act of pissing. I didn’t go to school today, claiming to be sick. I’ve spent most of the day lying in bed, with my eyes closed and breathing deeply, trying to bring on another dream. So far, no luck.
Tuesday, June 24, 1975, Locust Hollow—The evening was failing, light slipping from the sky. I lay on my bed, my arms behind my head, and luxuriated in the feeling of having nothing to do. School was over and I had no chores to do, which is unusual. Reverend Jack is fond of declaring idle hands are the devil’s workshop, so my grandfather endeavors to keep these hands of mine busy. And on the farm, something always needs doing: animals need to be fed; shit needs to be raked; something needs to be plucked out of the ground, striated with dirt and fertilizer. Though my brothers, under Grandfather’s tutelage, only seem to engage in play and mischief and the violence of pigeon shooting.
My hands and my mind, free to wander, inevitably—for he filled every corner of my mind—drifted to images of Rio. Rio, shirtless in boxer shorts in the locker room, a thin coat of sweat like mineral oil clinging to his shoulders and chest. It’s hot in my room at the top of the house; we don’t have air conditioning. The two window fans in my bedroom window do nothing to cool the air because my grandfather insists on putting them in the windows backwards so they can “draw the hot air out.”
No one in Locust Hollow has air conditioning—even window units are too expensive—except Reverend Jack, who has it in his house and in his office at the church, though the church itself, where we sweat all spring and summer as if sweat could purge sin like tears can release grief, remains without air conditioning. But no one in the congregation seems to mind because theythink Reverend Jack needs to be comfortable and cool to craft his fiery inspirational sermons—grounded in fire and brimstone and hell’s heat—that guide his flock.
My hand drifted to my dick. After, I tossed the sock under my bed with the one from yesterday, and the one from the day before, and the day beforethat, feeling guilty as if I’d stolen something from Rio when he wasn’t looking. I drifted into sleep, swearing I would stop doing this. Maybe I would start joining my brothers and our grandfather in their relentless shooting of pigeons, strangling of chickens, and tossing around a football in the dust—all of which they did with seeming joy and all for reasons I simply cannot fathom.
Sunday, July 1975, Locust Hollow—Locust Hollow, where we live—if you can call my existence in this hopeless place after my parents uprooted us from Springfield, living—where the farm is above all a story of failure and loss. Throughout the Hollow’s history, industry has swept in, like a plague of locusts, consuming its resources, then abandoning its fleshless carcass, leaving rusty bones to bleach and decay in the sun. First there were the stone quarries dug out of the hills that surrounded the town, depleted their treasures, then abandoned them. Then came the steel mills, now shuttered and rusting. There’s still a blouse and shirt factory in the next town, though. That’s where most people in Locust Hollow work.
I work three afternoons and Saturday mornings at Lewisohn’s, the lone department store in town—a family-owned emporium that sells “seconds” and last season’s fashions at discounted prices. Even the rarefied imported chocolates are discounted, as they are typically nearing their “best by” date. I’m spared working Sundays because Locust Hollow still has blue laws onthe books so no business is open after six p.m. on Wednesdays or on Sundays, so the populace, in need of saving, can attend Wednesday evening Bible study and spend all day Sunday in church repenting their sins and praying for others too firmly in the devil’s grasp to come to church to pray for themselves.
Mostly, I work so I can save for college and get the hell out of this godforsaken town—but also to escape my grandfather’s ill will, my brothers’ savagery, and the general gloom of the farm. It hasn’t always been like this; I haven’t always been discontented. Everything changed the summer after my grandmother died. I remember her as a rotund woman with graying hair. In my mind’s eye, I see her moving about the kitchen with purpose, covered in flour and speckled with blood.
After we moved to the farm following Grandma’s death, my world grew slowly dimmer, darkening until I found myself at midnight on the crest of a great crater, stumbling from place to place, foothold to foothold. My mother got pregnant in rapid succession and gave birth to my brothers. There followed the smell of alcohol and shouted words. Grief and violence blew past me like tumbleweed.
Friday, August 15, 1975, Locust Hollow—Every August, the migrant fruit workers arrive to pick pears, switching to apples in the early fall. By the end of October, they are gone.
To earn extra money, I join in the fruit picking in August, picking in the afternoons and Sundays once school starts, gathering pears and apples beside the migrant workers until the end of October.
