Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“When I was a teenager, I started going to early Mass before school every day, just to have that communion wafer in my stomach. And to this day I’m the best speller you’re likely to meet because every Friday at school we had a spelling contest, and the prize was a candy bar. The teacher didn’t know what to make of it: Billy Dawkins, who failed every test he ever took, winning spelling bees. I wanted to tell her that for a hamburger or a box of cereal, I’d learn anything they wanted, ace every test, but I was too proud for that, and besides, my father would have killed me. Not because he worried about what people thought. He didn’t. He just didn’t want anyone meddling in his business.

“I was sixteen the last time I saw him. I came home from school so hungry I’d almost fainted during PE, and when I walked in, I saw him at the table. Until then, I’d always figured that while he was starving us, he was starving himself also. It was a small consolation to think that way, that we were all in it together — you know, that that’s how being poor worked. The thing is, I think most days he did hold himself to the same standard, but not that day. That day he was sitting there with a mound of pickled pigs’ feet piled high on a sheet of butcher paper, everything about him slick with vinegar and grease, a pile of bones that he’d sucked clean tossed to the side. The bones were tiny, like children’s knucklebones. It was watching him suck those bones that did it. I knocked him off his chair and wrestled him to the floor. I had my hands around his neck, would have killed him too if my mother hadn’t come in then and begged me to stop. When I stood up, my father yelled, ‘Get out of my house. Get out and don’t come back. I’m not spending another dime on you.’

“And I said, ‘Right. Because that would mean doubling what you’ve spent so far.’ ” Bill laughed and finished his beer. “I’ve always been very proud that that was the last thing I said to him, that I had the presence of mind to say something, you know, sort of clever. So I packed a few things and left — never saw the bastard again. It wasn’t until he died that it came out about him being filthy rich, a millionaire actually. Of course, he’d written me out of his will the very day I left. My sisters tried to give me my third anyway, but I refused. I didn’t want a thing from him.”

“How did you survive?” Aaron asked. “You were just a boy.”

“Our priest helped. He was a good man — found me a job working construction and a place to live. I had to leave school, but that was bound to happen anyway. I did that for maybe eight or ten years, and then I got hooked up with this whole detective business, apprenticed myself to an old guy and found out I was pretty good at it. He couldn’t get around so much anymore, so I became his legs, and he taught me everything I know about the business, which is considerable.” He looked down at his empty beer glass as though he wished it were not empty. “It’s a funny thing, isn’t it,” he said. “I drop out of school when I’m sixteen, and here I am, almost forty years later, a teacher. Not a very good one, but it’s still a heck of a thing.”

“Yet another example of life’s abundant irony,” Aaron said. Then, afraid that Bill might think he was mocking him, he continued, “When I was a boy, my mother owned a café, which we lived above. My bedroom window looked out over the street facing Bildt Hardware and Swenson’s Variety Store, which sold primarily groceries but also school supplies and bed linens. At night I lay in bed, watching the Swenson’s neon sign flash off and on: Variety. Variety. Variety. Variety . I’d been watching that sign for years before it suddenly hit me that there was actually something very funny about a sign that promised variety flashing off and on in the same monotonous way night after night.”

It was the first time he had told Bill anything about his childhood, and he stopped there, not explaining about the pleasure he had felt that night at realizing that this was irony. That would mean talking about Clarence, who had predicted that he would grow nicely into irony. He was not ready to talk about Clarence.

Bill laughed. “Yup,” he said, “it’s a fine thing, irony.”

* * *

Bill still attended Mass at Mission Dolores once a week. “Oftener,” he told Aaron, “when I’m involved in a really sordid case.”

Aaron did not think that he had ever had a friend who attended church regularly. “Give me an example of sordid,” he said.

“Cheating spouses. That’s my bread and butter, you know.” Aaron did know, since Bill had told him several times that his caseload was made up, disproportionately, of adultery and workers’ comp scams. “They get messy.”

“Tell me about a recent case that required extra attendance at Mass,” Aaron said.

“I just went this morning,” Bill said. “Fourth time this week ’cause I’m tailing a guy who’s a real piece of work. Guess where he heads every night?”

He had also never had a friend who used words like tailing . “Where?” he said.

“The Castro. He’s got one of those transvestites on the side. You know — looks like a woman, but then the plumbing’s all male. Anyway, so I have to tell the wife that her husband’s a fag, and—”

“Bill,” Aaron interrupted. They were having this conversation in the hallway with just five minutes left of break, and he did not know where to begin.

“What?” Bill said, and then, “Oh, I get it. I shouldn’t say fag around you, right?”

“You shouldn’t say it, period,” Aaron said, and Bill looked at him as though Aaron had asked him to give up smoking or stop eating a hamburger for lunch every day.

Aaron knew what Walter would say about his friendship with Bill — Walter, who believed that gay men and straight men could never really be friends, that the former could never fully trust the latter. Though their social lives over the years had involved a preponderance of heterosexuals — colleagues, neighbors — Walter insisted that gay people could only be themselves, their truest, uncensored selves, in the company of other gay people. Aaron found this argument perplexing and reductive. “Do you think that’s how it was with you and the guys in Moorhead — that you were being your truest, uncensored selves?” he had asked, referring to the group of closeted men with whom Walter had been friends when Aaron came to live with him. “Because the truth is I didn’t feel any more true and uncensored with them than I did sitting around with the men at the café when I was a kid.”

Walter had acted incredulous — perhaps he truly was incredulous. “But didn’t it at least mean something to you, after all those years in the closet, to be able to say things out loud, to not wonder what people were thinking?”

“Maybe,” Aaron had said. He thought about it. “Okay, yes, though I don’t think I ever felt in the closet as a boy — that implies a level of awareness that I simply didn’t have. And I certainly never felt like myself around your guys either. I always felt the way I do when someone who’s really religious suddenly wants to be my friend and I can’t help but think that it’s not me, Aaron, they want to be friends with — because they don’t really know me. That’s how I felt with those guys — like I was just some gay boy that you were lucky enough to catch, and their job was to make clever remarks.”

“Well,” Walter said, “at least they never gave me the kind of look that everyone else did, those here-comes-Walter-with-his-boy looks.”

“Of course they did. The only difference was that they approved. But what were they approving of? What did they really know about our relationship? Did they know that we read poetry together at night? That we didn’t have sex those first four years? They didn’t, because they weren’t interested in poetry, and they believed we were having sex because that’s what you let them believe.” He wondered at what point in the conversation he had become angry.