Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Kenny had glimpses naturally, in nibbles and morsels and bite-size portions, arriving with the aunt who filled uncomfortable silences with innocuous, if equally uncomfortable, questions; with the trade school representatives and army recruiters who regularly prowled the cafeteria of his vocational high school. The future was thirty seconds during late-night syndicated dating shows where a low-rent spokesperson talked about the career in the exciting field waiting for you. It was some huge and unknowable network of people who were key to getting cushy summer jobs, like, say, being a lifeguard at a hotel pool. It didn't matter how much you wanted the whistle around your neck and the perch above all those oiled bodies. Like, like… like how you got it? The procedures involved? They were beyond Kenny, he didn't know how they worked or where to begin. The future was nebulous and large and halfhearted. It was a promise to get his shit together. Right after the commercial. After the show. Five more minutes. Kenny tried not to think about the future. Thinking— wanting —only hurt worse.

Shit happened, then more shit happened. That was the future.

The easiest way to deal was to stretch out across the floor along the far end of his dad's trailer and press his chest against a throw rug that in no way cushioned him from the hard floor. Occasionally, Kenny warmed up with a light sketch, say, a front porch — the house cat up on blocks in the driveway, the rusting jalopy trapped in a tree. Eventually his attention would turn toward his father's illicit pleasures, stashed in a cardboard box. His dad would be in some church basement for one of his “meetings,” he'd be relapsing at some penny-ante blackjack table, and Kenny would surround himself with soft-focus photographs on high-glossed pages: the syndicated bombshell lolling amid a frothy surf; the televangelist's infamous secretary straddling a pew; the airbrushed bodies that melted, as if by magic, into bearskin rugs; girls of the Ivy League, their pleated skirts tantalizingly raised; would-be starlets, more than eager to show a rosy cheek.

The harder stuff, it was there, too: magazines that were lusterless and brittle with dried misuse; women who were not bunnies, or pets, but haggard. Inhumane hairstyles. Eyes raccooned with dark circles. Page one seventy-six of a prehistoric Swan revealing a cigarette burn along a stringy, pockmarked forearm; the foldout from January's Cheri showing a deep bruise on the back of a thigh. On the rare — indeed, miraculous — occasion when a woman still wore panties, inevitably the fabric was flimsy, and the model always pulled it to the side. Using her index and middle finger, she'd spread apart the gates to what should have been her most private self.

A singular photograph had preoccupied Kenny for a good while now, most of the summer, really. It took up a full, loose page, which had been freed from the magazine's confining staples. Basically, the photo was a woman's head, a close-up. She had an oblong head, long and thin, with platinum curls framing her features in the manner of an ancient football helmet. The woman wore way too much makeup but you could still see pockmarks on her skin. Collagen bloated her lips beyond the cracking point. And there was something else — inside the squinting slits that doubled as this woman's eyes. This strange, almost unquantifiable quality. It brought a cohesion to her expression, it seemed to Kenny, a clarity to her pain, all but transforming her dried, crack whore face, creating a statement, a message that Kenny could not give words to, yet somehow recognized.

Stretched out in his father's trailer, sitting at his mom's kitchen table, trying to get away from all the drama by crashing with his aunt, using the loose magazine page in front of him as a guide, working from and relying on his memory, Kenny would clutch a nub of pencil and ignore his more carnal instincts. A yellowed white pages might serve as his table, the back of an unsolicited flyer as his canvas. With fastidious delicacy, he would reproduce the woman's chins of loose flesh. He'd take great pains to render her nostrils as bloated, and scribble a flush into her cheeks, so it appeared she had recently concluded a vigorous workout. Often, he tried to shade her gaze with what he felt to be a proper desperation. Then he might go back, augmenting her hatred, adding to it the first traces of a saddened poise.

Here and there a tangled forelock would fall in front of his eyes, and less often than this, he'd brush the annoyance behind his ear, and through every second he would become less aware of the water pump's arrhythmic hum. Further he'd retreat, further, until he entered a locale without matter or dimension, without thought or awareness of thought, this almost spiritual calm, where sound was black and the earth no longer rotated around the sun, and he was not ashamed of being a perv who rummaged through his dad's cardboard boxes for dirty magazines; indeed, in this realm of his own creation Kenny did not worry about the currents that run between a naked woman, the guy doing her, and the voyeur getting off on the scene. He did not worry about the fact that he had never kissed a girl.

The inside of his right hand became smudged with lead. His left sneaker lolled in slow, counterclockwise circles. He refused to think about whether letting Mom know about Dad's latest binge would end custody weekend visitations. He refused to think about senior year or anything that might happen afterward. Noticing a flaw, Kenny would quickly double back. Persistent, short jabs of his eraser would reconfigure the glop that sat, iridescent, on her soft jewel of a tongue. Broad strokes might reduce the ejaculate along her chin. Once in a while he even lucked out. The insulting connotations that accompany exaggerated humor would actually disappear, and the woman's face would be left with a stressed, fundamental humanity — the nobility inherent in struggles that cannot be won.

Problem was, about the only serious feedback Kenny'd ever gotten about his work had come on a school desk, scribbling back and forth with some dude who had a later class in the same room. You couldn't exactly know if you were any good when your only responses came from a person you'd never met and didn't know anything about. When the only real, live person who'd ever seen your sketches in person was all of twelve years old. Kenny had to get opinions from someone who mattered, he knew this much. All summer long, he'd counted down the days toward each weekend, figuring out which pictures were best suited for that particular visiting artist, coming up with new drawings, tweaking old ones, improving them right up until he'd gone too far. Kenny had ruined an embarrassing amount of his most promising stuff and then he'd acted as if it were no big thing, consoling himself with the idea that the whole deal was kind of stupid anyway. He sabotaged himself in other ways too, volunteering to take his aunt to a swap meet on a Sunday when a particular visitor was supposed to be receptive to amateur work. The Reliant hadn't started. He just plain didn't show up and Newell asked where he'd been, and he had no response, not anything believable. Newell shrugged, he answered, Sure, and from the hurt in the boy's eyes, Kenny saw that his friend believed in him just a little bit less, maybe Newell didn't even believe in him anymore, Kenny couldn't blame him if he didn't, retreating the way he did always made Kenny feel terrible and disappointed in himself, the biggest coward the world had ever known. But he couldn't help it. The thought of a reckoning was just that terrifying.

Beneath the awning outside Amazin’ Stories he took his time and retied his sneakers. He flattened out the drawings that had begun to curl up at the edges and rearranged the order of the sheets. Kenny felt along the war zone of his chin. His fingers ran over hairs he'd missed the last time he'd tried to shave, fledgling hairs that had grown in since then, and finally, a triangle of three small pimples. A deep breath. A ginger step forward.