Steven peeled himself from the passenger seat of the ’65 Rambler that had taken him from where route 11 met up with I-91 and squinted against the glaring late-afternoon sun. A paper bag with what the belongings he’d grabbed before he’d taken off in a fit hung from his fist. The Rambler had no A.C. Neither had the ride before it, the one he’d caught just outside of Brattleboro, but at least that one had raced up I-91, whipping his hair out the open passenger window and giving the baking hot interior some kind of breeze. The Rambler, on the other hand, had moved across route 11 like a post-nuclear turtle going to meet its doom. The back of his shirt and the backs of his jeans were sweat-stuck to him.
He shut the door and bent down to say thanks through the open window. The chrome burned his hand. He stepped back so the Rambler could pull out of his life.
He stood across the street from the Anchorage.
Probably Joe wasn’t there anyway. Summer jobs ended, people went home. Next summer you maybe got the same job back, or maybe you didn’t come back at all, maybe you took off for better chances. Maybe you took off for Boston.
A breeze off the lake felt good, felt a million times better than the interior of that Rambler.
If Joe wasn’t at the Anchorage—and why would he be?—he’d have himself an ice cream, cool off a bit, and then maybe he’d find a place to clean up. Then he’d start asking around, see if he could find out where Joe might have got to.
Because a year was gone and he hadn’t been able to shake Joe.
He couldn’t shake the Barn, couldn’t shake that night last summer watching Joe up on stage, couldn’t shake what he’d seen/heard/felt/wanted when Joe and the Jam Band had hit that slow-churning riff of “Rattlesnake Shake”.
Raunch, that’s what he couldn’t shake. The raunch. It did something in the hot insides of his belly to think about it.
He crossed the parking lot and headed into the Anchorage where the dimness inside, despite all the windows, gave the place the illusion of being ten degrees cooler than the parking lot.
He’d done such a swell job of convincing himself that Joe had moved—surely he hadn’t come back this summer; why the fuck would he?—that his fingertips only tingled a little bit with nerves. Just getting an order of ice cream, he told himself, shaking his hand out. Heck, if that cooled him off enough, he’d splurge on a basket of fries for dessert—
And that’s when an all-too-familiar figure stepped out from the kitchen, wiping his hands in his grease-stained white apron, grinning at something someone behind him had said.
Steven fought the urge to drag his fingers through the tangles in his hair, quick, before Joe saw him.
Joe’s eyes met his. Recognition flashed, and a fresh grin came on its heels. “Hey! Been a while since I’ve seen you around.”
“Yeah. Hey. I’m back in town. And you’re just the man I was coming to see.” He pointed his finger at him, like it was a gun. Forget ice cream, forget French fries. Forget hanging around here with a bird’s nest of hair and sweat all up the backside one minute longer than necessary. “What time you get off?” he asked, getting to the point.
They walked toward each other while they were speaking, everything else in the restaurant falling away from the edges of Steven’s awareness. The edges of his giving a shit. He came to a stop in front of Joe, close enough to shake hands.
They didn’t.
“Uh, seven I think,” Joe said, his hands still buried in the apron. Grease-soaked splotches here and there turned the fabric translucent.
Steven leaned against the low wall near where they stood. He set one elbow on top of it and cocked a hip outward.
“I’ll have to double-check the schedule,” Joe said. “You got something going on?”
“Not yet,” Steven said, with a little special something he knew people tended to read as a glimmer in his eye.
“Hey, you wanna come back around seven or—no, wait. Give me a chance to shower and change and shit.” He wiped his hands on his jeans, or patted around for a pack of cigarettes, one. He told Steven where he was staying. Steven knew the area, wouldn’t have a problem finding it.
And apart from thumbing yet another ride, this one to his parent’s lodge, apart from throwing the battered paper grocery bag of his stuff on a bed there, apart from showering, dragging a comb through his hair and changing into something that didn’t reek of sweat, Steven had nothing to do but lie on the bed with a fan blowing across his middle, his head cradled in his hands.
The electric clock ticked on the nightstand.
Five thirty six. Five fifty two. Six oh eight. Six twenty seven.
He pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
His stomach rumbled; he should eat before he headed over to the efficiency Joe was sharing with Tom.
It would kill time.
But he wasn’t hungry. His stomach was empty, but it was all knotted up, too. “Just cut it out already,” he said to it out loud, dropping a hand on it, the heel of his which landed on the buttons of his shirt. His palm and part of his fingers lay directly on skin. His fingertips rested on the thin material of the other side of his shirt. The buttonholes.
Button. Unbutton. Button? His fingertips pushed and pulled at the line of buttonholes. He couldn’t decide. He looked best, in his opinion, with the shirt hanging open to show off his flat stomach, his taut belly button. His chest wasn’t bad either. At least it wasn’t sunken anymore.
Mostly he was leaning toward unbuttoned because he liked the idea it conjured in his head: the idea of Joe standing close, pushing an open hand underneath the open shirt, his fingers disappearing under the fabric…he looks up….
He adjusted himself in trousers that had already been tight to begin with. Then reached over and picked a soft pack of Marlboros off the nightstand. He lit one, inhaled and closed his eyes.
Six thirty six.
He lay on his back with his face turned toward the clock, the clock ticking away at him. The white second hand jerked. Tick Tick Tick. Plenty of time to give the rattlesnake a shake before he had to head out. His hand rested lightly in the vicinity of the top button of his trousers—high enough feel a little stomach skin, low enough to put a little pressure against the side of the ol’ snake. Hot enough to heat everything up under the fabric.
He was just going to have to jerk off when the night was over anyway.
But he preferred the idea of showing up on Joe’s doorstep with the aura of wanton need radiating off him.
At seven sixteen he opened his eyes, startled to see that time had passed. He felt refreshed and a little out of it all at the same time. He pushed up onto his elbows, his shirt falling farther open. Seven seventeen. Gettin’ close. He pissed, brushed his teeth and sprayed fresh deodorant in his pits.
Seven twenty two.
He lit another cigarette, leaving two in the pack.
Seven twenty three.
Seven twenty four.
He paced in front of the fan smoking his second to last cigarette until seven thirty nine and thirty seconds, at which point he checked that he had his wallet before heading out through the lodge’s lobby, where he stopped to ask if anyone was heading into town. No luck. He headed on out to the road, walked up it backward, his thumb going out whenever a car came around a corner or crested a hill. He walked the road backwards, humming an old James Brown tune and thinking about Joe. And raunch.
He smoked his last cigarette.
Eight twelve and he closed another car door, bent down to thank another tourist for a ride. Eight seventeen and he walked out of the Mini Mart with a six of Ballantine and a pack of Marlboros.
Eight thirty two, he turned onto Joe’s street. Tipping his face up, he looked at the third floor windows of a brown farmhouse-turned-apartments, wondering which windows were Joe’s. Sweat stuck his shirt to his shoulder blades.
Whistling, he turned up a cracked concrete walkway and headed up to the big front porch, wondering if Joe had been looking out a window, seeing him coming.
Inside and up two flights of dark, narrow stairs he found himself in front of a heavy door. A Stones song grinded from under it. The door’s off-white paint had put on too thick; it was chipping away around the panels. He adjusted his shirt, smoothed his hair back, and rapped on the door.
“Hey! I thought you might’ve got lost,” Joe said when he opened the door.
“Who me? Here. Something to cool the fuck off with.” He lifted the six pack of Ballentine out of the bag.
“Cool. Thanks.”
“Better put them in the fridge before they get even more piss warm than they already are.” He stepped into the third-floor efficiency Joe and Tom were sharing. The floor in the hallway was hardwood; in the apartment thick brown and gold shag covered the living room, the kitchenette, even—as far as Steven could tell from where he stood—the bathroom. What better way to keep in the heat.
“Where the hell do you guys sleep?” Steven asked.
“That’s a pull-out.” Joe pointed at a green couch the same color and texture as a stuffed frog Steven used to drag around, a long, long time ago. Then he pointed to a bunch of posters on what looked like a badly-constructed wall. “And that pulls down from the wall.” He drew the back of his arm across his brow.
“Which is more comfortable?”
“In this weather? Neither.” Joe handed him one of the Ballantines and turned to head for the fridge.
“So where’s Tomcat?”
“Out chasing some chick he met at the country club a few days ago. I didn’t even get a chance to tell him you were back in town yet.”
Third floor. Thick carpet. One window in the whole place, as far as he could tell. Steven blinked a few times, slowly, his eyelids hot and wet in the creases. He thought even the walls had to be sweating.
“Hey, let’s head out to the porch,” Joe said. “It’s hot as balls in here.”
“No kidding,” Steven said.
Joe moved an oscillating fan away from the window, then folded himself up to climb through.
“There’s a porch out there?” Steven asked, popping his can open.
“Yep!”
Steven stuck his head out the window. “This is the porch?”
“Yeah. Have a seat.” Joe, settling himself on the roof shingles, patted a spot beside him.
It couldn’t be worse than sitting in the apartment.
“Call it a slanted porch,” Joe said, clamping his can of Ballantine between his thighs so he could get a cigarette out and light it.
“Without railings,” Steven added, ducking through the window. He put a hand against the glass as he took his first step on the roof. Luckily, Joe wasn’t too far away. One more step and he was able to take a seat where Joe had patted. He stuck his legs out in front of him and felt around his shirt pocket for his own pack of cigarettes.
Joe’s window looked out from the back of the house, and the house’s yard backed up to a stand of trees, and maybe a clearing beyond that, but the trees got in the way of making it out. It was, actually, a pretty good view, just the trees and the sky and maybe an overgrown clearing somewhere not too far off. The occasional sound of a car driving by out front. The rattle of someone grabbing silverware coming from somewhere below. Mosquitoes buzzing by his ears.
“Been keeping busy?” Joe asked.
“You know it.” He slapped an itch his cheek. His hand came away clean. He took a drink. Joe took a drink. The trees were starting to darken with the oncoming dusk; the spaces between the leaves were starting to turn black and velvety. “The Jam Band still together?”
“Yep.”
“Think it’s going places?”
Joe took a breath—then let out, “Not the way it is, I don’t think.” He rubbed shingle with his thumb. “Fuck if I can put my finger on what needs to change. Or I can, sometimes, but getting people to make a change is wicked fucking hard—heck, even getting them to understand what kind of change you’re talking about…. Forget it.” He dragged on his cigarette. “Tom gets it, pretty much, but that’s it.”
Steven watched him swallow down some more beer.
Then Joe asked, “How about you?”
How about him was he was frustrated. It came out in the strain and pitch of his voice as he talked about bands and dipshits and the New York fucking club scene and William Proud and Don and fucking Ray and that fucking Twitty guy and how fucking fed up he was—to here, he said holding his hand like a shelf against his forehead, like a salute. “Fuck it.” He turned up his can and dumped the last two swallows of warm beer down his throat.
He had to take a leak, and he wasn’t lit enough yet to try pissing off the side of a pitched roof, so he climbed back through the window, and climbed back out a few minutes later with fresh, slightly cooler beers.
“Thanks. Tom and I talked about New York,” Joe said. He popped the top of his beer can and flicked the tab off the roof.
“You want my advice? Don’t fucking bother,” Steven said.
“That’s about the conclusion we came to.” He drank. He said, “It’s not the scene we’re looking for.”
Steven let his empty second can roll off the roof. It bumped over the ends of the shingles and then over the gutter. After a second, they heard it land softly on the grass.
Joe crumpled his can. “My turn.” He threw it toward the line of trees, then stepped past Steven and climbed through the window.
When the last two beer cans were lying somewhere in the back yard and the sky was purple, Steven headed back inside to use the small bathroom with the slanted ceiling again.
Joe was in the kitchenette when he came back out.
“There anything left?” Steven asked.
“A-ha!” Joe pulled his arm out of a cabinet and flashed a half pint of cheap vodka that hadn’t even been opened. He broke the seal, and back on the roof, they passed it between them, the vodka burning their nostrils as they swallowed, the plastic cap nestled in the palm of Joe’s hand, the same hand that dangled a cigarette between two fingers—like there was going to be any reason to put the cap back on at some point.
Steven laughed—at what he wasn’t so sure. Joe laughed, too. The dark line of trees looked like a fence guarding the jewels just starting to twinkle in the evening sky.
The empty vodka bottle sailed over the yard and thunked against a tree branch. Leaves shimmied and shook. The bottle dropped to the ground.
Steven’s belly felt warm, and when Joe came back through the window with two bottles of cold beer in his hand—“Borrowed ‘em from the chick across the hall”—Steven shifted just a little closer to where Joe planted his ass on the roof shingles.
The last record on the stack ended just then, Chuck Berry’s “O’Rangutang” fading out. Steven took a long, cool swallow of beer.
“Shit. I should have changed that before I came out,” Joe said, but made no move to get up.
Somewhere out there, spring peepers called out to lonely treefrogs everywhere.
“I’ll get it in a minute” Joe flicked his bottle cap off the roof.
Steven stubbed a cigarette out on the shingles.
The minute turned into two, into three. Just as Joe said, “All right, I’ve gotta piss anyway,” a noise came from inside the house. They looked toward the window.
“Must be Tom,” Joe said.
As Steven started to get to his feet, he held out his hand. “Hold on, let’s see if he brought anyone with him.”
They crawled over to peek in the window. And sure enough, Tom appeared in view with a blond chick, maybe the one from the country club. Steven didn’t want to bother asking.
“Want a beer?” they heard Tom say.
“Whoops,” Joe said lowly.
“Shit,” they heard Tom say, his head bent behind the refrigerator door. “Uh…how about some water? I thought we had—”
“It’s okay.”
“You sure?”
“You smoke?” the girl asked. What she pulled out of her pocket book wasn’t a pack of a cigarette.
Joe and Steven exchanged raised eyebrows.
“You wanna listen to some music?” Tom asked.
Steven’s fingers closed more tightly around the neck of his bottle. He wanted to take a drink—his mouth was dry—but he didn’t want to make any movements that might make Tom or the girl take a closer look at the window.
They watched Tom go to the record player and take the Chuck Berry LP off, search around for its jacket, give up and finally lay the vinyl down on top of a stack of newspapers. Steven couldn’t see the cover of what he was replacing the Berry with.
Tom set the needle down.
“Stop Messing ‘Round” started up; Fleetwood Mac’s English Rose album. Wouldn’t have been one he’d have picked to get him laid, but to each his own.
They watched Tom and the girl get comfortable on the scratchy green couch with the duct-taped rip in one of its cushions. They watched her giggle. They watched him murmur something, his face close to hers, both of them smiling. They watched her drag her lower lip under her teeth and give Tom that look.
“Oh shit, here we go,” Steven said in a stage whisper as Tom and the chick started making out on the couch.
They were watching from opposite sides of the window. Under the guise of getting a better view, Steven shifted closer to Joe, clutching his half-drunk bottle of beer in one hand and using the other to steady himself, fist on the sill, then on Joe’s shoulder. He shifted close enough for his ass to butt against Joe’s leg. Close enough for his elbow to poke Joe. Close enough that when he shot a grin to his right, his face was nearly in Joe’s hair.
Tom’s girl pulled back, smiling, and lit the pipe she’d gotten—along with a baggy of stuff that wasn’t oregano—out of her pocket book.
They passed the pipe back and forth a few times.
When the chick let Tom go back to pushing his tongue into her mouth, Steven placed his hand against the middle of Joe’s back. Joe’s t-shirt was warm from being so close to his skin, maybe from the heat coming off the shingles, too. Now it was getting even warmer, against Steven’s palm.
When Joe reached behind his neck to scratch a fresh mosquito bite, Steven felt his muscles and bones move.
Tom slid his hand up the inside of the girl’s shirt and squeezed her tit.
She didn’t push his hand away.
Steven’s fingers pressed against Joe’s back. His breaths quickened. He didn’t glance to the right to check with Joe. He just turned his hand so that his fingers pointed downward and slowly slid his palm down Joe’s back. Slowly and deliberately.
When his fingertips met up with Joe’s back pocket, Joe twisted himself away, coming to sit on his ass on the shingles, grabbing with one hand to the sill of the window.
The bottom of half-full bottle in Steven’s hand banged against the roof and broke free of his hand.
It rolled. Steven reached his fingers out in an attempt to catch it before it was too late—but it was too late. It gained speed and flew over the gutter into the darkness.
His heart pounded. He didn’t want to look over at Joe and read what Joe might have on his face at this particular moment. His beer was gone and his mouth was dry and he needed to piss and why hasn’t Tom poked his head out the window to see what the fuck was going on yet?
He looked back toward the window.
Joe was peeking in the window.
Joe looked Steven’s way. Steven questioned him about what was going on inside, using just his eyebrows.
“I don’t think they heard anything,” Joe whispered; Steven caught it mostly by the way his mouth moved; Fleetwood Mac drowned out most of the words.
Steven crawled back up toward the window and looked inside, his shoulder bumping against Joe’s. Joe didn’t jerk away. Maybe he thought what happened a minute ago was an accident.
Tom and his country club girl were Siamese twins, attached at the mouth. His hand rubbed between her legs, over her short shorts. His fingers tried to push up the leg of them. His thumb kneaded her sweet spot, through the fabric of the shorts.
“Come on,” Joe whispered, close enough for Steven to hear it through the music this time. “Let’s get out of their way.” He pulled away and stretched out on the roof a few feet to the right of the window. “We’re stuck out here till they’re too far into what they’re doing to notice us creeping by,” he said in more of a normal voice, once Steven crept past the window and sat down between it and Joe.
Joe settled the back of his head on an open hand. The fingers of his other hand curled loosely around the bottle of beer propped on his stomach. “Maybe when they’re done we can head over to the Barn, see what’s going on.”
The way Steven was sitting, he didn’t feel all that secure. A cough, a quick twist of his head, a particularly large mosquito—anything could upset his balance and send him rolling off the roof like his beer. He shifted onto his hip and then stretched out on his side, facing Joe, elbow propped on the singles, head propped in his hand.
“How about that bar in Charlestown?” Steven said.
“There’s that,” Joe said. He held out his beer.
Steven shook his head.
“You might as well, after I sent yours sailing down to the back yard,” Joe said.
Steven reached across what wasn’t all that big of a space between them and put his fingers on the bottle. His fingertips touched Joe’s fingers. Then Joe let go and dropped his hand to his stomach.
Steven took a sip and held the beer in his mouth for a second or two. After swallowed he said, “Yeah, well, if anything it was my own damn fault.” He held the bottom of the bottle toward Joe, but Joe’s eyes were closed. His fingers tapped his belly in time with “Black Magic Woman”. Steven took another pull off the bottle.
“Wonder how far they’ve made it in there,” he said.
Joe shrugged, then reached for the bottle.
Their fingers touched again as the bottle got passed off. Lingered, Steven thought.
Joe lifted his head to drink. As he swallowed, he opened his eyes and shook the bottle. There was half a swallow left in the bottle. He tipped it down, then chucked the bottle into the night.
They listened to it thunk in the dirt.
Joe stretched his arms up over his head.
He seemed close. His presence seemed close. Fleetwood Mac moved into “I’ve Lost My Baby.”
And Joe turned onto his side, facing Steven, his head flat on his arm while Steven’s was propped up on a hand, giving Steven a chance to look down at him. Steven felt a light tug at a stray lock of hair and thought at first that the asphalt shingles had snagged it.
Joe wasn’t looking at him, even though he was facing him. He had a sort of inward look to his eyes. Probably the alcohol and the heat were making him drowsy. Then his eyes flashed up. After a blink and they were facing Steven’s shirt collar again.
Another tug came. Steven put it together: the fingers at the end of the arm that Joe’s head was on.
“Wonder how long they’ll be,” Steven murmured, shifting his hips a little. A little closer.
Joe’s answer was a mumbled “Dunno” and a shrug of his left shoulder. The left shoulder led to an arm led to an elbow, which was resting against Joe’s side, and that led to a forearm to a hand, to fingers loosely curled, knuckles resting against the shingles between them. A light piece of ash, left over from a cigarette one of them had smoked, had caught against a hair on Joe’s arm. Steven brushed it away with his fingertips.
Joe’s eyes looked up again, then held for half a second before Steven looked away, out toward the line of trees and the rhinestone-studded sky.
Looking away had pulled his hair out of Joe’s fingers.
He heard the softest of shifts behind him, wrist bone against asphalt shingle—and then there was another gentle pull at his hair.
Aw, fuck it. If these weren’t signals then what was?
When he turned back down toward Joe, he moved his whole body, putting his right hand down on the roof on the other side of Joe’s ribs, sliding his right knee over Joe’s. His side lifted off the roof, and Joe shifted onto his back, his one arm still stretched up and back, the other moved off his stomach to touch Steven’s side, lightly.
Steven’s head cast a shadow over Joe’s face.
And then he closed his eyes and it was all darkness, until the first touch of their mouths, which was like fireflies against his eyelids. And then it deepened. It went all thick and purple.
Raunch.
It was in the way Joe’s lips pulled back, in the way Joe’s thigh pushed up. Kissing Joe was exactly what the slow-dragging riff of “Rattlesnake Shake” had felt like that night in the Barn last summer. His nerves felt like low E strings, thick and vibrating. Thrumming. In his throat.
Joe dropped his head back against the shingles. He smiled.
“What?”
“I don’t know why I’m doing this. I’m don’t—It’s not my bag, you know?”
“Yeah?”
Joe was smiling again. “Yeah.”
“Yeah, well I know why you’re fucking doing this.”
“Yeah?”
Steven drew two fingers down Joe’s throat. He stopped when he found Joe’s pulse. It throbbed against his fingertips, the rhythm of want. “Same reason I’m doing it,” he said, his voice roughed up and soft. “There’s this thing, this magnetism…. I don’t know if you that night I caught your show at the Barn, but I sure as hell did.” He pulled himself up higher on Joe, laying his crotch right on top of Joe’s.
Joe’s fingers rubbed Steven’s side, outside the shirt. His other hand was still thrown upward and outward, fingers half curled. His eyes were half closed. Then he blinked and looked up into Steven’s eyes. “Yeah,” he said, and his voice was just as roughed up. “Yeah, I felt that.” His fingers pulled at Steven’s side. “When you going back to New York?”
Steven braced himself with both hands against the shingles and looked down at Joe. “Who says I’m going back? Didn’t I just spend a fucking hour telling you everything that was fucked up down there these days? But we ain’t gonna make it big up here in East Bumfuck, you know.”
“Tom and I been talking about Boston.”
“Boston,” Steven said. “That could work.” He grinded a little against Joe, in case Joe’s attention was wandering.
The hand on his ass said it wasn’t.
“Think they’re done yet?” Joe asked, tilting his head toward the window.
“Aw, who the fuck cares?” He pushed his hand up the front of Joe’s t-shirt, feeling what Joe was built with underneath. Smelling the cigarette smoke that clung to both of them. The smell of beer and vodka on their breaths. In a quieter voice, in his serious voice, he said, “You really mean this?”—not sure of which ‘this’ was he was talking about, not sure it mattered, when it came down to it.
Joe brought a hand through Steven’s hair.
The Fleetwood Mac album ended.
Joe gave his answer with a nod.
Steven felt Joe’s fingers, flesh against flesh, slip underneath his unbuttoned shirt.
They really didn’t care whether Tom was finished inside or not.
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