Andrew – Seneca, Late August 1983
Chores done, dinner over, Andrew sneaks from the house to the solace of the woods and the path that leads to Cheat River. Andrew can almost forget the afternoon’s heat and his loneliness as he climbs the tree- covered rise, not even Buck at his side this evening. Overhead, wilting leaves hint at changes to come, the end of summer vacation, the start of school, the day when the mountainside will blaze ochre and red. Already Andrew can picture his breath fogging the air on chilly mornings as he waits for the bus to carry him back to school, that otherworld of locker-lined halls and crowded classrooms where he is sure to see Jimmy Gilmore again.
Months have passed since the rainy spring afternoon when the two boys trespassed into Momma’s bedroom. Since then, Jimmy has spoken to Andrew only once--the last day of school--and Andrew still feels the sting of his words: ‘No, I don’t want to hang with you at the river no more. Go fag out over somebody else.’
With those words, Andrew’s summer transformed from a welcome reprieve to a prison sentence, a span of time barely broken up by trips to store or the YMCA. Andrew has forgiven Artie for laughing at him last year and now stays late after Open Swim, using helping out as a pretense for spying on Jimmy as he shoots hoops on the upstairs basketball court. Jimmy plays on a summer league team, is always
surrounded by other boys like Ricky Pierce. There is never a right moment for Andrew to approach, to say he’s sorry, though sorry for what he’s not quite sure. Will there come such a moment once school starts? Andrew turns the question over in his head, anxious for its final resolution. But that moment is not now. Right now there is only the quietness of his walk to Cheat River.
Evening is always the best time to go—better than mornings when the dew gets sneakers wet. Better than sweaty afternoons when his hours are stacked with chores. Better than night when he’d have to take a flashlight to find his way. Only this hour offers the contentment of knowing what the day has brought him, good or bad. The sting of Momma’s words has faded; his sister’s chicken-dumpling supper lies warm in his stomach. Now is the hour when the light lingers and the shadows stretch, his moment of amnesty, when he can lie on the riverbank and forget his troubles with a touch of his hands. They could be anyone’s hands, he thinks. Artie’s, thick-knuckled and wide, flecked with fine blond hair at the wrists. Or Jimmy’s, bony and thin, forgiving him with their touch.
Andrew quickens his pace up the trail. He traces the ridge that runs toward town. In spots the tree line breaks away to reveal the valley below, the tops of Seneca’s tallest buildings awash in the distance beneath the late-day light. Andrew doesn’t stop to look. He hurries on to where the path forks, taking not the branch that leads to town but the one that leads to Cheat River. Getting to the swim hole by road would
take nearly an hour of winding through hollows and hills, of searching out the old logging road that once trucked timber away. Andrew carves his path the way the crow flies, paring shortcuts from his father’s old route until at last he descends to the sound of rushing water.
There on the bank he sits beneath the wild magnolia where his father’s bird dog lies buried. He thinks about how he never once saw his father take Sadie hunting. Going to war must have made him lose interest in such things. But Andrew doesn’t want to think about that now. He concentrates instead on the light and shadow on the river, the color this evening of coffee with cream. Spring afternoons is what he wants to remember, hours spent skinnydipping with Jimmy by his side, back when the water warmed enough that the two of them could ride the tire swing together out above the river together, Jimmy’s face so close Andrew could feel the boy’s breath on his cheek. At the cry Geronimo! the two would jump. Now the tire swing hangs empty, barely swaying.
Andrew unbuttons his cutoffs, zips down his fly. He will not feel guilty for wanting his friend. This is just a phase, he tells himself. He closes his eyes and lets someone else’s hands take hold of him--Jimmy’s hands--now during the saving grace of the day.
But what would Momma do if she found him like this? Make good on her threat to cut him with her scissors? That was just her temper talking, wasn’t it? Andrew never knows what she truly means. There is no understanding a mother whose love runs hot and cold, no easy After School Special to tell him how to make his family normal, to make himself normal inside.
Certainly trying to tell Mrs. Applebee at Bible school last month had proven to be a joke. For a whole week at the start of July, Andrew had been the only teenager in a ragged assemblage of kids otherwise aged six to twelve, most of them misfits whose parents cared less about salvation than they did about getting a breather from their little troublemakers. Yet Mrs. Applebee took her role seriously. She said so in the flyer she began tucking into church bulletins once summer vacation began. She had once taught mathematics at a military academy in Virginia, and, in the year since her husband’s death, she had attended evangelical retreats with her sister, returning from the Deep South ready to start “a Bible boot camp for today’s at-risk youth.” Those were the words that caught Momma’s eye and made her decide to send her cross-dressing, fucked-up heathen of a son to the one place where the fear of God might be drilled back into him. That was why Andrew had to go and Allison didn’t. This was the only way she could think of to whip his wayward pecker back into shape.
But despite his fears, Bible boot camp didn’t strike Andrew as so bad at first. Mrs. Applebee remained ignorant of the reason he was there, and, since he was the eldest, she looked upon him as an assistant. Andrew didn’t mind; working with the younger kids was fun. They didn’t strike him as especially ornery, just craving attention. In the multi-purpose room beneath the Methodist church’s congregation area, he helped them memorize Bible verses and the Ten Commandments, helped them manufacture sock
puppets of the Twelve Apostles, helped them crayon pictures of Joseph in his many-colored coat. But the basement room was hot and the children often grew restless.
Mrs. Applebee was prepared for that. When a little blond boy misbehaved, she whacked his open palms several times with a ruler. “The best idea the Catholics ever had,” Andrew heard the old woman whisper under her breath as he escorted the boy to the bathroom to wipe away his tears. When Mrs. Applebee repeated the punishment to another student the next day, Andrew decided she had crossed a line. He decided to stir up dissention in the ranks. He waited until all the kids had gathered at a table to make angel faces out of paper plates to ask her point blank if she thought beating a kid with a ruler was what Jesus would do. Mrs. Applebee looked at him with her mouth agape. ‘If, if Jesus lived in this day and age,” she stammered, “I think he most assuredly would.’
Andrew liked seeing an adult flustered because of him. A warmth spread though him that had nothing to do with the basement’s inadequate air-conditioning. Because Mrs. Applebee was especially partial to the Fifth Commandment, he pressed her about it; he asked what Jesus would say when it came to honoring thy mother or father when their actions were anything but honorable. He thought of his mother and her fucking scissors.
Mrs. Applebee told the younger kids to get back to work. She pulled Andrew aside and asked what the devil had gotten into him. Andrew searched her face for sympathy, but found none. Momma had lived in Seneca her whole life, knew everyone in town. They were sure to take her side over that of a moody boy. But still he felt the need to tell someone. He wanted Mrs. Applebee to know the real reason he had to stick up for the kids. His voice cracked as he struggled to find the words. “Sometimes parents do things they shouldn’t,” he said. If he said any more he feared he might cry.
The interrogating look on Mrs. Applebee’s face collapsed into a smirk. “Like what? Giving your bottom a whopping when you no doubt deserve it? I’ve seen how surly you can be. All I know is you’d better watch what you say.” She went on to ask whether a whipping was really worth having Andrew’s mother taken away and never seeing her or his sisters again. That’s what juvenile services did, Mrs. Applebee explained. Andrew wanted to tell her that spankings weren’t what he was talking about, that it was more than that. He wanted to say that it was the invisible threat of his mother always being mad at him, of blaming him for what her life had become--but he didn’t know how to say it, and Mrs. Applebee
wouldn’t listen anyway; she simply cut him off with the crisp declaration that she had raised five boys of her own and hadn’t been afraid to take a belt to their backsides when circumstances warranted. Once, she said proudly, she had even backhanded her youngest when he cussed her to her face.
“Momma backhands me, too,” Andrew finally snapped, “and she doesn’t even take the cigarette out of her hand.”
At the riverside, the thought of Widow Applebee’s pruney-faced lack of empathy shrivels any sense of desire Andrew has. He grows limp, tucks himself away, sags his head against Sadie’s tree.
Was it really only a season ago that he laid here with Jimmy? It feels like forever since they last spoke. ‘Go fag out over someone else.’ Each time Andrew thinks of those words, a rock hits bottom inside him. Is that what he is, a faggot?
He wishes he could scribble away the past and start over, the way he can start a new drawing when what he’s worked on turns out wrong. But the world isn’t one of his drawings. He will have to find his own place in it. For too long he has hated himself, and he is tired of it. He is tired of crying in bed at night hoping no one will hear. He is tired of hatching delicate knife cuts on his arm and legs just to feel again, tired of telling Momma the marks come from stickers brushing against him in the woods. He should be able to be who he is and not have it hurt.
But how can that happen? “Born into original sin,” Mrs. Applebee used to remind her charges, “and the whole world rolled downhill from there.” Maybe she’s right, thinks Andrew as he watches the river. Maybe he deserves what Momma does to him. After all, what are Momma’s sins against his own? Is the torment she inflicts on him any worse than what he has done with Jimmy--trying to poison birds with Alka-Seltzer tablets, almost causing car wrecks with stupid shaving cream bombs, jumping from the woods to nearly give a heart attack to the retarded guy who delivers the paper? Andrew laughs bitterly at this last memory, how he and Jimmy braved chigger bites as they lay in wait at the edge of the woods for poor stupid Willy Zirbs.
Andrew had made the mistake of calling Willy a paperboy years ago. “Paper man!” Willy had trumpeted haughtily, and it was true he had the five-o’clock shadow and lumbering height to back up his claim. The rest of him was a study in stunted development: his silly short pants and cartoon T-shirts, his thick Coke-bottle glasses, the bug-eyed haplessness he wore on his jowly face. It was common knowledge that his dead mother had provided for his food and rent with a meager trust fund, but delivering The Seneca Sentinel saw to Willy’s pocket money and sense of purpose. And yet how easily the paper man’s sense of self could be stripped away as Andrew and Jimmy burst screaming from the brush. A look of stuttering fury exploded upon Willy’s face. He blew at the boys with the whistle he used against dogs. “No fair,” Willy cried. “No surprises!”
Laughing, Jimmy elbowed Andrew and pointed at Willy’s shorts, wet now with pee Andrew felt bad then but reminded himself that guys like Ricky Pierce refused to let remorse weaken them. He kept quiet as Jimmy egged Willy on. “Hey Willy, you want to know the definition of a surprise?” Willy shook his head ‘no’, but Jimmy told him anyway. “A fart with a lump in it.”
Willy didn’t laugh at the tired kindergarten joke, but Jimmy sure got a kick out of it. There was no stopping him. “You know who’s got the hots for you?” he asked. “Andrew’s sister!”
“Hey, Willy,” Jimmy goaded. “I got another surprise for you. This one’s about Super-Fan.” Willy Zirbs stopped dead in his tracks.
“Jimmy, wait,” said Andrew. This was going too far.
For years Willy had been coming to local football and basketball games wearing a blue bath towel, a red dime store mask and a black knit cap--the guise of Super-Fan. Countless times Andrew had seen Willy standing in the bleachers, matching the middle school cheerleaders cheer for cheer, though usually a word or two behind. Like the rest of the town, these girls knew the hardships Willy had been through and they halfheartedly tried to humor him, though Willy had been known to wreak pandemonium in the middle of their routines. Their red pom-poms stirred him like a cape before a bull; at the end of last football season, Andrew had watched wide-eyed as the girls’ halftime pyramid collapsed, causing Super-Fan to launch himself over rows of spectators, arms extended in flight as he swooped to the rescue. Horrified, the cheerleaders tried to dodge the lumbering man-child as he attempted to scoop them up in his arms. It took both the principal and Coach Wyatt to finally restrain him.
“I know who Super Fan really is,” Jimmy teased the day of the ambush. “Not me!” Willy shouted. “He’s not me!”
Andrew grabbed Jimmy’s arm. “Don’t.”
Jimmy shrugged him off. “Of course he’s not you, Willy,” Jimmy said. “That’s because Super-Fan is a, is a--” he milked the revelation for every iota of suspense, “a big fat retard!”
Poor Willy Zirbs looked like he had just swallowed a chunk of Kryptonite. What fun there had been in teasing him altogether soured in Andrew’s stomach. If this is what guys like Ricky Pierce felt, then Andrew wanted no part of it. He turned to go home then and would have if Jimmy had not cajoled him into going to Cheat River.
Andrew throws a stone in the water and thinks how that incident couldn’t have been more than a week before things with Jimmy went to hell. Jimmy’s awful words repeat in his head like a refrain. ‘Go fag out over someone else.’ Maybe Andrew really is a fag. Maybe he needs to accept the fact that he and Jimmy will never again swim here or build another model together.
Andrew has been back to the tree fort Jimmy dubbed his Fortress of Solitude only once since school let out. That had been in July, on the day he rescued a few of his father’s things from his mother’s ceremonial goodbye bonfire. He had taken those items to the tree fort along with all his completed models from home; he didn’t want constant reminders of the people who’d abandoned him, but neither could he part with the mementos altogether. His metal footlocker was the answer. On the fort’s wooden rail edge he placed King Kong, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, lining them up like exhibits in a zoo. It reminded him of the alien creatures Superman kept in his own Fortress of Solitude. Andrew had read all about the Man of Steel’s interplanetary menagerie in Superman No. 187, a musty issue from the ‘60s he had found in the attic last year alongside a box of letters saved by his Great-Aunt Adalene.
The letters were from Andrew’s father, but the man had only recently left, and the letters hurt too much to read. Andrew hid them from his mother and buried his nose instead in that 80-page issue where all of Superman’s secrets were revealed.
Superman was like those weird animals himself, thought Andrew. The only one of his kind on earth. Yes, technically there were others, but they didn’t count--not the wraithlike evil Kryptonians jailed in the extra-dimensional Phantom Zone, not the shrunken citizens sealed within the Bottle City of Kandor