John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

Behind him he heard giggling, and backed out to find Allen, Travis, Gus, Bruce, and the bucktoothed stranger all gathered there. He cupped his hands over his cock, and they laughed harder.

“It don’t bother us,” Bruce said. “Be naked. Don’t you like to?”

“Or we’re too old to be naked in front of,” Gus said, causing more eruptions.

Letting his hands fall, Stephen stood there as casually as he could. He wanted his demeanor to convey that he still had friends in high places, and that those high-placed friends would come fuck everybody up.

“Dude, your clothes is under the sycamore,” Bruce said. “We were just having fun.”

Bending to pick up a tree branch, Stephen focused in on Bruce’s pouty eyes.

“I mean, how about a laugh?”

“Keep the clothes. You’re right, I like being naked.”

“So you opened those curtains on purpose.”

“The bus came each day at seven and three,” Stephen said, and right away the offenders’ trance was as rapt as any angry jury’s.

He had them. “There was a girl named Piper with coppery hair and a blue backpack,” he said, thinking maybe he understood what Jeremy had been doing at meetings. He’d been proving people’s sheer gall to believe.

“And?”

“And this,” he said, swinging the tree branch like a bat toward Bruce’s head. But it was so rotten that it broke in midair.

“I’m not one of you,” he said, while Bruce laughed. “What I just said was a lie.”

“It’s the truth according to Georgia.”

“I’m leaving Georgia.”

“If you don’t know reciprocity, you’re a shitty lawyer.”

“That’s only with bordering states,” he said, a bigger lie than the high-placed friends or the bus. He’d had the friends; the bus had come at the hours he’d named, even if there was no Piper, no girl, no boy, no one but Seamus.

They left him alone to pull on his pajamas, but he was too drunk to be alone. He carried a beer to the fire, where the others were talking about some quarry.

So Jeremy had been telling the truth.

He sat down opposite Gus, who turned and said, “Look, dude,” cutting his bucktoothed twin off midsentence. “Most days you won’t even talk to us.”

“I was framed by a judge. You’re rapists.”

“How do you know I wasn’t framed?”

“Were you framed?”

“Why should I tell you?”

Stephen tried to think of a clever answer. None came. He thought of replying that there was a bathhouse called the Downtown Men’s Club, where after Seamus died he took to sitting in the pitch-black darkroom. With nothing left to live for, you were free to go where you wanted and pursue hard dreams. Seamus had jumped without even trying — unless his hard dream had been sobriety — but Stephen was ready to try. Even after posting bail, he kept it up. After a month he knew the regulars by the feel of their bodies. Sometimes in the locker room he saw faces, too, like the corporate lawyer’s who’d beaten him in a suit over swing sets. Baxter Philpotts. About once a week Baxter sucked Stephen off in the darkroom and didn’t know. One day Baxter showed up with the judge assigned to Stephen’s case, a round redhead named Harold Hawkins. They were soaking in the hot tub when they saw Stephen passing by. The judge pursed his lips, and Stephen smiled. The slightest smile back might have meant join us , but neither man gave up that gesture, and Stephen was left to wonder upon conviction if the encounter was his true crime.

“Are you gonna answer?”

“I forget the question, but I imagine the answer is I don’t care,” he was saying when he heard footsteps. Good, he thought, having chosen what to tell Jeremy. Forget Alaska. You’re on the no-fly list and if you drive they won’t issue a passport. Then he would sit back and watch Jeremy grapple with never going north. It would serve as punishment not only for portraying Stephen in the meetings but for being young, for having a future.

This, said a voice in Stephen’s head, was how he treated the people he liked.

The footsteps weren’t Jeremy’s after all, but Patrick’s.

During the pandemonium, Stephen guzzled one of Patrick’s malt beverages. I don’t care, he kept telling himself every second of the next hour. If he hadn’t been drunk or in shock, he might have fled. For safety, for good. Mourning the deaths of child molesters didn’t involve him. Dragging their bodies around. Planning what to do. Bruce proposed pitching camp deeper in the woods. Allen said he could find a fair-minded official to hear their case. “Practice Gandhian nonviolence,” Stephen suggested, just to make fun, as they burbled on.

Had they not heard him? Should he take further offense?

To prove once and for all that he wasn’t a part of them, he brought out a book, hastily chosen from his stacks. The Confusions of Young Törless . Too drunk to read, he opened it randomly and moved his eyes over the words. There had always been something that his thoughts could not get the better of, something that seemed at once so simple and so strange. There had been pictures in his mind that were not really pictures at all .

Before he could learn whose thoughts, or pictures of what, Bruce snatched the book away and tossed it into the fire.

Stephen turned from Bruce’s soft, pudgy face, which appeared amused even in anger, toward the flames engulfing Young Törless . The spine curled and was gone.

“Somebody’s got to show you how it is,” Bruce said.

Intending to throw a punch, Stephen stood up. Bruce’s face was shaped that way from having no shame. Without shame, you could grin and crack jokes. You could hide people’s clothes, wonder where sports stars would live. Bruce had probably been born that way, plus it didn’t hurt to ignore the past. The sickly mother he’d been avenging in Savannah had recently died. Never again would Bruce weaken to think of her, whereas Stephen’s mother was alive and well in Augusta, in the house he’d grown up in. She had thrown legendary Masters parties there until Stephen’s arrest. “When you were gay,” she’d said, “I didn’t mind, but this?”

He’d called his mother callow, but those socialites had been her friends. It hurt when friends took themselves away from you. You wanted to hurt them back, or you were liable to hurt yourself instead. After Seamus died, when he knew he’d be feeling no more pleasure anyway, he purchased enough cocaine to use up his serotonin for good, and snorted it for a week. When it was gone, he poured a whole coffee bag into one filter and tapped brew , hoping to make his heart burst. Waiting, he grew ripe with sweat. Wasn’t it December? He undressed and opened every window. Raising the last one to the icy wind, he heard a pop. Steam was rising from the griddle. He’d forgotten to fill the reservoir.

He went to unplug the machine, remove the pot. As one noise dwindled, another grew: a bus — he could see it out the living room window, pulling up.

Where he stood, he was invisible, but the situation was too interesting not to respond to. Heart racing as he’d wished, he crossed to the front of the house, until the bus wasn’t thirty feet away. Atlanta Public Schools . High schoolers, middle schoolers; either way the boys in back were the ones to watch. The very day he died, Seamus talked about boozing in the back of the bus, getting high for the first time, in severe contrast to Stephen’s stifled childhood when he’d wanted daily to give up his forlorn front seat. The boys in back had sensed his yearning, turned against him, those same kids staring now. Carafe in hand, he stared back. Look at me, fuckers; I’m a trial lawyer. He was too old to envy them, he knew. He knew to envy Seamus was to misread Seamus’s story. A girl approached the bus stairs from inside. It was her stop. Had he been ogling her all year? Your Honor, he never even learned his neighbors’ names. The driver warned her back in. They went chugging on down the road. Blind strings in one hand, pot handle dangling from the other, Stephen wondered what he’d meant to do.