Post by Robin on Jun 25, 2006 21:52:32 GMT -8
'Kay, Chris is a boy now and his name's Kit, for now. I can't find another good Chris-related name, so if anybody has any suggestions feel free to toss them out there.
And this one is a lot more religious. For my own protection, I'm not trying to convert you or anything. It's just an important part of this moment.
------------
The day Marty’s mom died, we were in Wyatt Dreier’s basement, drinking (some of us soda, most of us passing around a bottle of cheap scotch that Sam Jordan had commandeered from his dad’s sock drawer). Sid Boyle was there, playing the part of tagalong that he was forever eager to play, and had been trying to “convince” Marty and I to, as he so charmingly and maturely put it, “do it.”
“They call it a loveseat because Marty and Kit are supposed to do it on it,” he informed us matter-of-factly, and Wyatt choked on his grape soda.
“You can’t use that line again,” he said to Sid. “You already used it on Cuh-cuh…” He spluttered on the last word and couldn’t say it, but just shook his head and took a vehement swig of his soda, latching onto the bottle so hard I could hear his teeth clink against the glass. A quaff of the scotch would have done him good – I was feeling pleasantly fuzzy, myself – but I hadn’t seem him drink at all since Caroline died. Sid licked his lips and stared at Wyatt with wide eyes for a moment, and then seemed to recover. A clownish grin spread across his face.
“Yeah, but this time it’s different, my dear Wyatt. I told ole Carrie that they call it a loveseat because the guy who invented it banged his girlfriend on it.” He cast a glance back at Marty, and they exchanged grins before Sid went on. “I think Marty should have invented it. But then I wouldn’t have gotten to tell Carrie the joke about it.”
“Don’t call her Carrie!” Wyatt’s hand was clenched around the bottle so tightly that his knuckles were white. “She hates it when people call her Carrie!”
Marty and I exchanged a glance. I had a feeling that I wasn’t the only one who found it subtly disturbing that Wyatt still referred to Caroline in the present tense.
The uncomfortable silence that followed was broken by the strident jingling of the telephone. The tightness I had seen in Marty’s shoulders relaxed and Sid broke into the happy beam that he was so familiar with. Sam and I both breathed a sigh of relief, and Wyatt stared at the ceiling as he had become accustomed to do since Caroline’s death. Sid, who was closest to it, picked up to phone and answered with a snappy ‘hola.’ Whoever was on the other line talked for a minute, and his forehead crinkled slightly.
“Huh? Oh! It’s you, Mr. Randall! Do you want to talk to Marty?” He passed the phone over to the other boy, and both Marty and I frowned and the former pressed the receiver to his ear.
“Yeah, dad?” I couldn’t hear his dad on the other side of the line, but I could see Marty, and what I saw wasn’t good. His expression changed with an almost comic sync to what his father was saying from consternation to apprehension to deflation to horror. “What?” he said into the receiver, and his voice cracked so badly that he had to repeat himself. “What happened? Yeah, I’ll be over there as soon as I can.” He hung up and looked up around the room, his face the exhausted, pinched visage of an old man. “My mom’s dead,” he said. “She OD’d.” Wyatt gave a choking sound that might have been laughter and might have been sobbing. Sam shook his head and took a monster swig of his dad’s scotch. Marty told him to throw some of that his way, and when the bottle came to him he drank so long that I thought he was going to suffocate. I stood up then.
“Come on, Marty,” I said to him quietly. “We’ll go to the hospital.” He allowed me to half-pull him to his feet, and he handed the bottle over to Sid reluctantly.
“We’re stopping by my house first,” he said, and I didn’t argue.
At his house, he went straight to the room that his parents shared with the single-minded determinedness that I had never seen him use except when dealing with his Semisonic CDs. He rifled around in there for awhile, and came out with a beautiful rosary dangling from his fingers. He held it out from him like it was something dead and looked at it like it was something impure that he touched only out of necessity.
“Mom always wore this,” he said bitterly. “She always used to joke that the Lord would strike her down if she took it off. I saw her put it in her jewelry box this morning; I don’t know why.” He was looking somewhere above my head, his eyes a stormy blue-gray that disturbed me as Wyatt’s reference to Caroline had earlier. There was a heartbreaking tension in his neck that made me reach out my hand impulsively to touch his shoulder, murmuring his name softly, but the trembling of those shoulders made me draw back.
“I’m going to bury it,” he announced, as if we had had a long conversation surrounded the rosary. I looked at the lovely thing and had to restrain myself from gaping in horror. I was not Catholic myself, but I knew the significance of it to the religion and I knew that the crucifix wasn’t just plaster and paint. It was made of some heavy metal from the way it hung from his fingers, and besides the beautifully detailed Jesus on it, it was embedded with tiny jewels that, though I suspected they could have been paste, were sparkling like a lake under sunlight. He looked down from the place above my head, his eyes suddenly a clear and intense blue. “Are you going to help me?”
For some reason I couldn’t find my voice. When I finally did it cracked a little, even after I had cleared my throat subtly. “Of course, Marty.”
He nodded and disappeared into a door that I assumed led to the garage, and came back in with two shovels cradled in his free arm. He still held the hand that held the crucifix out from his body, like I would hold a rotting mouse or snake. He led me out to the backyard, walking stiff and solemn like a man walking to a funeral, and then lightly tossed me one of the shovels, pointing to a spot with the toe of his tennis shoe. Dingy and dirty as the shoe was, it shone bright as faith in the grass that was the dark green that Mr. Randall would only allow it to be.
“Right here,” he said. “This is where we’re digging.” He looped the rosary about his wrist and stabbed the tip of his shovel into the ground. After he had a hole started that was big enough so that two shovels could actually work at the same time, I started helping. It was not hot outside, but the soil was stiff and consisted mostly of clay, and the shovels were too big for either of us to handle properly. I could feel beads of sweat popping out on my forehead and blisters beginning to form on my hands, and wondered wryly how Marty was faring. Oddly enough, I had always had the tougher hands of the two of us. He had nimble, steady hands, better suited for untangling jewelry chains or rubbing scratches out of CDs (and act which he did with a great amount of tenderness as well as aptitude) than digging holes or anything like that.
At some point during the digging, I looked over at him to see if he looked anywhere near finishing. He had paused for a moment, and I thought for a few seconds that he was going to say the hole was deep enough, but he had merely taken the crucifix off of his hand and tucked it into his pocket. Finishing that, he looked at me, and his face was haunted. The need; the desperation in his eyes was enough to send my own eyes and nose the tingling, needling demand of my body to cry.
“You can stop whenever you want,” he told me, . “You don’t have any obligation here.”
“But I do,” I said, and he just looked back at the hole.
“Won’t be able to dig much farther anyways,” he said, almost too quietly for me to hear, and I nodded in agreement even though I knew he was too absorbed in the digging to look over at me. We had almost reached the water table, which wasn’t exactly a great accomplishment, but what wasn’t exactly child’s play, either. Even so, I didn’t think as I dug and only stopped when I felt Marty’s hand, hot and moist, on my wrist.
“Don’t dig any farther,” he said, and I was only too happy to comply. I tossed my shovel aside and he did the same, turning the motion into a fluid combination as he reached into his pocket and drew out the crucifix. He shook it out slowly, gently, and I could see his eyes morph a confused cycle from blue to gray as he watched it glimmer in the pale gray light seeping through the clouds. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” he said, almost wistfully, and dropped it into the hole with a disrespect nearing ignorance that belied his near-reverence before. He looked down on it for a moment before kicking a clod of dirt into the hole, dirtying the shine of the crucifix at the crux of the rosary, and then beginning to fill it back in. My arms screamed in protest as I picked up my shovel and began to help, but filling in the hole was easier work than making it. We were done quickly, and Marty didn’t even bother to pack down the soil. He just dropped the shovel and slumped.
Discarding my own shovel, I took a couple steps towards him and reached for his hands, pulling them up palms up. They were blistered and raw looking, smeared here and there with blood.
“Your hands,” I said, and uttered a noise akin to the one Wyatt had made earlier, the laugh-sob.
“My hands,” he replied, his face solemn. “Stigmata, do you think?” Those blue eyes, so heart-breaking in their indecision of color, were shimmering with the first traces of tears, and, in a surge of compassion for him that I hadn’t found it necessary to feel for Marty in a long while, I found myself kissing the palms of his hands, not caring that I was probably getting dirt and muck from the shovel’s handle and pus from his blisters all over my mouth. And it seemed fitting, to me, as his hands, the hands that he sinned with, were gone from my mouth, the mouth that I sinned with, and pressed on my back, drawing me closer so that our mouths could meet. Pray for us sinners, he had said, and it rang through my head as clearly as if I was listening to a CD that he had recorded it onto. Part of the Hail Mary; any vampire movie buff would know that, even though it was Our Father that the priests (who often lost their faith) would usually scream at Dracula as they brandished a glowing crucifix at him. If Marty had been a vampire movie buff, I would have assumed he had picked it up there, but Marty wasn’t. I was the movie buff, and he was the Catholic. I had always thought of him as a not-so-devout Catholic, a Stanley Uris type of character who was defined and grouped by his religion but really had little idea of what it meant to be a Jew or to be a Catholic. Apparently, I was wrong. Hail Mary, full of grace, I thought. The Lord is with thee. The prayer ran through my mind, even as the taste of scotch permeated my mouth from his. Lust was one of the seven deadly sins, but it didn’t seem like a sin, not then. Not with his shoulders, bird-thin and vulnerable beneath my hands. Anything that vulnerable, that innocent, could never sin. He could suffer for the sins of others, but he could never sin himself. Marty the Martyr. Marty the Saint. How was it that I had come into the company of a saint when I had never wished for such a blessing (or curse, depending on what point of view one chooses to take), when there were others who would have gladly mutilated themselves or died to share one moment of the intimacy that we had? At the moment, I didn’t care. All I cared was that there was Marty, there was the taste of scotch, and there was the prayer. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, he had said. Against his mouth, my lips formed the word ‘amen.’
And this one is a lot more religious. For my own protection, I'm not trying to convert you or anything. It's just an important part of this moment.
------------
The day Marty’s mom died, we were in Wyatt Dreier’s basement, drinking (some of us soda, most of us passing around a bottle of cheap scotch that Sam Jordan had commandeered from his dad’s sock drawer). Sid Boyle was there, playing the part of tagalong that he was forever eager to play, and had been trying to “convince” Marty and I to, as he so charmingly and maturely put it, “do it.”
“They call it a loveseat because Marty and Kit are supposed to do it on it,” he informed us matter-of-factly, and Wyatt choked on his grape soda.
“You can’t use that line again,” he said to Sid. “You already used it on Cuh-cuh…” He spluttered on the last word and couldn’t say it, but just shook his head and took a vehement swig of his soda, latching onto the bottle so hard I could hear his teeth clink against the glass. A quaff of the scotch would have done him good – I was feeling pleasantly fuzzy, myself – but I hadn’t seem him drink at all since Caroline died. Sid licked his lips and stared at Wyatt with wide eyes for a moment, and then seemed to recover. A clownish grin spread across his face.
“Yeah, but this time it’s different, my dear Wyatt. I told ole Carrie that they call it a loveseat because the guy who invented it banged his girlfriend on it.” He cast a glance back at Marty, and they exchanged grins before Sid went on. “I think Marty should have invented it. But then I wouldn’t have gotten to tell Carrie the joke about it.”
“Don’t call her Carrie!” Wyatt’s hand was clenched around the bottle so tightly that his knuckles were white. “She hates it when people call her Carrie!”
Marty and I exchanged a glance. I had a feeling that I wasn’t the only one who found it subtly disturbing that Wyatt still referred to Caroline in the present tense.
The uncomfortable silence that followed was broken by the strident jingling of the telephone. The tightness I had seen in Marty’s shoulders relaxed and Sid broke into the happy beam that he was so familiar with. Sam and I both breathed a sigh of relief, and Wyatt stared at the ceiling as he had become accustomed to do since Caroline’s death. Sid, who was closest to it, picked up to phone and answered with a snappy ‘hola.’ Whoever was on the other line talked for a minute, and his forehead crinkled slightly.
“Huh? Oh! It’s you, Mr. Randall! Do you want to talk to Marty?” He passed the phone over to the other boy, and both Marty and I frowned and the former pressed the receiver to his ear.
“Yeah, dad?” I couldn’t hear his dad on the other side of the line, but I could see Marty, and what I saw wasn’t good. His expression changed with an almost comic sync to what his father was saying from consternation to apprehension to deflation to horror. “What?” he said into the receiver, and his voice cracked so badly that he had to repeat himself. “What happened? Yeah, I’ll be over there as soon as I can.” He hung up and looked up around the room, his face the exhausted, pinched visage of an old man. “My mom’s dead,” he said. “She OD’d.” Wyatt gave a choking sound that might have been laughter and might have been sobbing. Sam shook his head and took a monster swig of his dad’s scotch. Marty told him to throw some of that his way, and when the bottle came to him he drank so long that I thought he was going to suffocate. I stood up then.
“Come on, Marty,” I said to him quietly. “We’ll go to the hospital.” He allowed me to half-pull him to his feet, and he handed the bottle over to Sid reluctantly.
“We’re stopping by my house first,” he said, and I didn’t argue.
At his house, he went straight to the room that his parents shared with the single-minded determinedness that I had never seen him use except when dealing with his Semisonic CDs. He rifled around in there for awhile, and came out with a beautiful rosary dangling from his fingers. He held it out from him like it was something dead and looked at it like it was something impure that he touched only out of necessity.
“Mom always wore this,” he said bitterly. “She always used to joke that the Lord would strike her down if she took it off. I saw her put it in her jewelry box this morning; I don’t know why.” He was looking somewhere above my head, his eyes a stormy blue-gray that disturbed me as Wyatt’s reference to Caroline had earlier. There was a heartbreaking tension in his neck that made me reach out my hand impulsively to touch his shoulder, murmuring his name softly, but the trembling of those shoulders made me draw back.
“I’m going to bury it,” he announced, as if we had had a long conversation surrounded the rosary. I looked at the lovely thing and had to restrain myself from gaping in horror. I was not Catholic myself, but I knew the significance of it to the religion and I knew that the crucifix wasn’t just plaster and paint. It was made of some heavy metal from the way it hung from his fingers, and besides the beautifully detailed Jesus on it, it was embedded with tiny jewels that, though I suspected they could have been paste, were sparkling like a lake under sunlight. He looked down from the place above my head, his eyes suddenly a clear and intense blue. “Are you going to help me?”
For some reason I couldn’t find my voice. When I finally did it cracked a little, even after I had cleared my throat subtly. “Of course, Marty.”
He nodded and disappeared into a door that I assumed led to the garage, and came back in with two shovels cradled in his free arm. He still held the hand that held the crucifix out from his body, like I would hold a rotting mouse or snake. He led me out to the backyard, walking stiff and solemn like a man walking to a funeral, and then lightly tossed me one of the shovels, pointing to a spot with the toe of his tennis shoe. Dingy and dirty as the shoe was, it shone bright as faith in the grass that was the dark green that Mr. Randall would only allow it to be.
“Right here,” he said. “This is where we’re digging.” He looped the rosary about his wrist and stabbed the tip of his shovel into the ground. After he had a hole started that was big enough so that two shovels could actually work at the same time, I started helping. It was not hot outside, but the soil was stiff and consisted mostly of clay, and the shovels were too big for either of us to handle properly. I could feel beads of sweat popping out on my forehead and blisters beginning to form on my hands, and wondered wryly how Marty was faring. Oddly enough, I had always had the tougher hands of the two of us. He had nimble, steady hands, better suited for untangling jewelry chains or rubbing scratches out of CDs (and act which he did with a great amount of tenderness as well as aptitude) than digging holes or anything like that.
At some point during the digging, I looked over at him to see if he looked anywhere near finishing. He had paused for a moment, and I thought for a few seconds that he was going to say the hole was deep enough, but he had merely taken the crucifix off of his hand and tucked it into his pocket. Finishing that, he looked at me, and his face was haunted. The need; the desperation in his eyes was enough to send my own eyes and nose the tingling, needling demand of my body to cry.
“You can stop whenever you want,” he told me, . “You don’t have any obligation here.”
“But I do,” I said, and he just looked back at the hole.
“Won’t be able to dig much farther anyways,” he said, almost too quietly for me to hear, and I nodded in agreement even though I knew he was too absorbed in the digging to look over at me. We had almost reached the water table, which wasn’t exactly a great accomplishment, but what wasn’t exactly child’s play, either. Even so, I didn’t think as I dug and only stopped when I felt Marty’s hand, hot and moist, on my wrist.
“Don’t dig any farther,” he said, and I was only too happy to comply. I tossed my shovel aside and he did the same, turning the motion into a fluid combination as he reached into his pocket and drew out the crucifix. He shook it out slowly, gently, and I could see his eyes morph a confused cycle from blue to gray as he watched it glimmer in the pale gray light seeping through the clouds. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” he said, almost wistfully, and dropped it into the hole with a disrespect nearing ignorance that belied his near-reverence before. He looked down on it for a moment before kicking a clod of dirt into the hole, dirtying the shine of the crucifix at the crux of the rosary, and then beginning to fill it back in. My arms screamed in protest as I picked up my shovel and began to help, but filling in the hole was easier work than making it. We were done quickly, and Marty didn’t even bother to pack down the soil. He just dropped the shovel and slumped.
Discarding my own shovel, I took a couple steps towards him and reached for his hands, pulling them up palms up. They were blistered and raw looking, smeared here and there with blood.
“Your hands,” I said, and uttered a noise akin to the one Wyatt had made earlier, the laugh-sob.
“My hands,” he replied, his face solemn. “Stigmata, do you think?” Those blue eyes, so heart-breaking in their indecision of color, were shimmering with the first traces of tears, and, in a surge of compassion for him that I hadn’t found it necessary to feel for Marty in a long while, I found myself kissing the palms of his hands, not caring that I was probably getting dirt and muck from the shovel’s handle and pus from his blisters all over my mouth. And it seemed fitting, to me, as his hands, the hands that he sinned with, were gone from my mouth, the mouth that I sinned with, and pressed on my back, drawing me closer so that our mouths could meet. Pray for us sinners, he had said, and it rang through my head as clearly as if I was listening to a CD that he had recorded it onto. Part of the Hail Mary; any vampire movie buff would know that, even though it was Our Father that the priests (who often lost their faith) would usually scream at Dracula as they brandished a glowing crucifix at him. If Marty had been a vampire movie buff, I would have assumed he had picked it up there, but Marty wasn’t. I was the movie buff, and he was the Catholic. I had always thought of him as a not-so-devout Catholic, a Stanley Uris type of character who was defined and grouped by his religion but really had little idea of what it meant to be a Jew or to be a Catholic. Apparently, I was wrong. Hail Mary, full of grace, I thought. The Lord is with thee. The prayer ran through my mind, even as the taste of scotch permeated my mouth from his. Lust was one of the seven deadly sins, but it didn’t seem like a sin, not then. Not with his shoulders, bird-thin and vulnerable beneath my hands. Anything that vulnerable, that innocent, could never sin. He could suffer for the sins of others, but he could never sin himself. Marty the Martyr. Marty the Saint. How was it that I had come into the company of a saint when I had never wished for such a blessing (or curse, depending on what point of view one chooses to take), when there were others who would have gladly mutilated themselves or died to share one moment of the intimacy that we had? At the moment, I didn’t care. All I cared was that there was Marty, there was the taste of scotch, and there was the prayer. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, he had said. Against his mouth, my lips formed the word ‘amen.’
