Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

Carlton’s wife was staring at me with none of her husband’s bonhomie. “Your folks know where you are, son?” she asked, scrutinizing me. She didn’t wait for an answer but instead turned to Carlton, not bothering to lower her voice.

“He’s underage. We don’t need that kind of trouble.”

Before Carlton Ray could respond, a woman rushed into the garden, dragging two bewildered kids in her wake. She charged up to an apple-shaped loser with a comb over who’d been busy chatting up a middle-aged woman with saggy breasts and a disappointed frown.

“Randall!” The new arrival yelled. “Randall, look at me, I’m talking to you.” The man with the comb over didn’t even turn to her, like he was stone deaf.

The angry woman had dyed blonde hair that hadn’t been done in a good while. There were dark circles under her eyes.

“You emptied the checking account. How am I supposed to pay the rent? How am I supposed to put a roof over our children’s heads? You tell me that?”

Randall was putting on a great show of being invisible, but the way he stiffened up told anyone looking that he knew she was there alright.

“Look at me! Will you look at me? I’m standing right beside you!”

Carlton Ray and his wife made a beeline for the woman. She got so agitated on seeing them that the frowning woman had to restrain her.

“You stole all our money!” Randall’s wife screamed at Carlton Ray.

If he was surprised in the slightest by her accusation he didn’t show it.

“How am I supposed to feed my kids?” The anger went out of her. She staggered and almost fell, sobbing hopelessly.

I felt just dreadful for her. I turned to Jordan. He wasn’t paying the scene any attention, but it was taking some effort.

“Happens a lot,” he said eventually and lit the doobie. He took a toke and exhaled discreetly into the darkness.

“You really believe you’re gonna go hitch a ride on a meteor and go bouncing around the satellites?”

He shrugged, “Stranger things have happened.”

When? I thought but didn’t say. “What do your folks think about it?”

“Not a lot. They left.”

“What do you mean, ‘left’?”

He took another long, sorrowful toke on the joint. “I came home. I’d been away a few days. They’d moved out of the trailer. Handed back the keys. No address. No note. Nothing.”

Jordon had been living at the plantation house for a few weeks. He had a tiny room up in the eaves that had once been a child’s. Jordon was so tall he had to crook his neck to walk from the door to the bed. The peeling wallpaper of trains and airplanes made him look younger and vulnerable, and reminded me that he didn’t have a home no more. I wanted to put my arm around him. I wanted it more than I’d wanted anything in my life.

I was already crazy late; if my folks had looked in on me and found me missing, there’d be an All Points Bulletin out by now, but somehow I couldn’t leave. I was paralyzed by lust, pure and simple. I knew I was going to sit there until Jordan or someone else threw me out.

Jordan was really stoned, sweaty, singing along to records of English bands I’d never heard of. He stripped down to his shorts. His torso was long and slim and perfect◦– tight pecs and a hard ridge of abdominal muscles. A line of fuzzy black hair escaped the front of his shorts, ran up to his belly button and made my throat dry.

He caught me looking at him.

“What are you up to?” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was amused or not.

“Nothing!”

“You like girls?”

“Course,” I lied.

“Yeah? What you like ‘bout ‘em?”

“What do you mean ‘What do I like about them?’ Like physically?”

He sat down on the bed next to me. His bare knee touched my jeans.

“Yes, like physically. What you like?”

“Er, I like girls’… asses, I guess.”

“Do you indeed?”

“I do.”

“What do you like about girls’ asses, little boy?”

“Well I guess I like ‘em because they’re… round.”

Jordan looked at me right in the eye, and then he burst out laughing. He was laughing all over.

“You’re a caution, boy!” He said, “and as cute as puppies.”

I sat there feeling exposed, confused, hopeful and covering the rock hard boner tenting in my pants.

I replayed that night in my head a million times. What did he mean by “cute”? Like a little kid? Or maybe, just maybe, cute like, you know, he liked me.

After that night I spent all my free time at the plantation house, or the “Departure Lounge” as Carlton Ray had grandly renamed it. I told my folks I was doing an extra credit assignment on the history of Meridian. I stopped by the library everyday and swapped unread books to leave around the house to throw my Pa off the scent. He was barely speaking to me. Truth was he could hardly bear to look at me. Not that I cared. All that mattered was Jordan and the evenings I spent in his tiny room.

Three days before the comet was due, Jordan was lying next to me on his single bed.

“What are you gonna do after I’m gone?” he asked.

I had spent ten minutes maneuvering my arm so it could flop casually over his. I ran my fingers along his forearm. There were a series of small parallel scars there. I wasn’t a fool, I knew what they were. He noticed me looking and batted my hand away. Some days he would let me touch him, others I just made him pissed. It usually depended on how much he’d drunk and smoked.

“I asked you a question.”

Truth was I didn’t like to think about it. I didn’t believe that Zedekiah was parking up above us, but right now I had Jordan all to myself. Or as much of him as he would ever allow me to have. Who knows what would happen after the comet came and went?

“Dunno. Maybe I’ll come.”

Jordan lifted himself up onto his elbow and looked down at me.

“You serious?”

“Ain’t got much keeping me here.”

Jordan looked troubled. “Look, you can’t tell no one, but I heard Carlton and his misses shouting up a storm. Carlton said we’re going to have to leave our Earthly bodies behind.”

“Like astral projection?” I asked.

I had spent an unsuccessful afternoon trying to spirit walk after reading about it in The Encyclopedia of The Unexplained ◦– a book I sent away for from the back pages of the Enquirer and had treasured until my father found it and threw it out, to prevent me from “filling my head with nonsense.”

“What on God’s Earth is astral projection?” Jordan laughed, “Sometimes you don’t make a lick of sense.”

I hated it when he didn’t take me seriously, when he acted like I was more than just two years his junior.

“I just wanna go wherever you’re going,” I said. I had meant it as a bold declaration of love, but it popped out like a babyish whine.

Jordan looked pissed for a moment. I swallowed uncomfortably. The temperature in the little attic changed. He got up and went and sat by the window, sparking up his half smoked joint.

“You should get out of here,” he said, his voice cold. “Your mama’ll be missing you for dinner.”

Three days later Carlton Ray told us exactly how we were going to travel to the comet. Seven people walked out of plantation house that day and never came back. I wasn’t one of them.

Jordan was barely speaking to me. I was more a member of the group than I had ever been, but I had lost my place as his buddy. He kept to himself, running errands for Carlton Ray without complaint. When I tried to hang out with him, he’d be polite and all, but he disappeared first chance he got, leaving me feeling about as welcome as a bad smell.

The Departure Lounge was quiet on the Day of the Ascension. Three more people had left since Carlton Ray’s announcement. Thirty-seven of us would ascend to Zedekiah’s ship. Some people sat quietly and prayed. The woman with the frown◦– her name was Julie and she had joined the group by walking out on a boyfriend that beat on her◦– sat and cried quietly all day. Carlton’s wife paced in the garden and chain-smoked.