So Bobby and I continued to attend the same school and see each other about in our yards, and play sometimes when the game was big and involved other people as well. I grew up enough to understand what our parents thought of McBean, that he was often drunk. This was what had made his nose purple and made him rave about the Stuarts and made him slip in his snowy yard, his arms flapping like wings as he fell. “It’s a miracle,” my mother said, “that he never breaks a bone.” But nothing much more happened between Bobby and me until the year we turned sixteen, me in February, him in May.
He was tired a lot that year and developed such alarming bruises under his eyes that his parents took him to a doctor who sent them right away to a different doctor. At dinner a few weeks later, my mother said she had something to tell me. Her eyes were shiny and her voice was coarse. “Bobby has leukemia,” she said.
“He’ll get better,” I said quickly. Partly I was asking, but mostly I was warning her not to tell me differently. I leaned into her and she must have thought it was for comfort, but it wasn’t. I did it so I wouldn’t be able to see her face. She put her arm around me and I felt her tears falling on the top of my hair.
Bobby had to go to Indianapolis for treatments. Spring came and summer and he missed the baseball season. Fall, and he had to drop out of school. I didn’t see him much, but his mother was over for coffee sometimes, and she had grown sickly herself, sad and thin and gray. “We have to hope,” I heard her telling my mother. “The doctor says he is doing as well as we could expect. We’re very encouraged.” Her voice wobbled defiantly.
Bobby’s friends came often to visit; I saw them trooping up the porch, all vibrant and healthy, stamping the slush off their boots and trailing their scarves. They went in noisy, left quiet. Sometimes I went with them. Everyone loved Bobby, though he lost his hair and swelled like a beached seal and it was hard to remember that you were looking at a gifted athlete, or even a boy.
Spring came again, but after a few weeks of it, winter returned suddenly with a strange storm. In the morning when I left for school, I saw a new bud completely encased in ice, and three dead birds whose feet had frozen to the telephone wires. This was the day Arnold Becker gave me the message that Bobby wanted to see me. “Right away,” Arnie said. “This afternoon. And just you. None of your girlfriends with you.”
In the old days Bobby and I used to climb in and out each other’s windows, but this was for good times and intimacy; I didn’t even consider it. I went to the front door and let his mother show me to his room as if I didn’t even know the way. Bobby lay in his bed, with his puffy face and a new tube sticking into his nose and down his throat. There was a strong, strange odor in the room. I was afraid it was Bobby and wished not to get close enough to see.
He had sores in his mouth, his mother had explained to me. It was difficult for him to eat or even to talk. “You do the talking,” she suggested. But I couldn’t think of anything to say.
And anyway, Bobby came right to the point. “Do you remember,” he asked me, “that day in the McBean cellar?” Talking was an obvious effort. It made him breathe hard, as if he’d been running.
Truthfully, I didn’t remember. Apparently I had worked to forget it. I remember it now, but at the time, I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Bonnie Prince Charlie,” he said, with an impatient rasp so I thought he was delirious. “I need you to go back. I need you to bring me a bottle of whiskey from McBean’s cellar. There’s a unicorn on the label.”
“Why do you want whiskey?”
“Don’t ask McBean. He’ll never give it to you. Just take it. You would still fit through the window.”
“Why do you want whiskey?”
“The unicorn label. Very important. Maybe,” said Bobby, “I just want to taste one really good whiskey before I die. You do this and I’ll owe you forever. You’ll save my life.”
He was exhausted. I went home. I did not plan to break into McBean’s cellar. It was a mad request from a delusional boy. It saddened me, but I felt no obligation. I did think I could get him some whiskey. I had some money, I would spare no expense. But I was underage. I ate my dinner and tried to think who I could get to buy me liquor, who would do it, and who would even know a fine whiskey if they saw one. And while I was working out the problem I began, bit by bit, piece by piece, bite by bite, to remember. First I remembered the snow, remembered standing by the tree watching the cellar window with snow swirling around me. Then I remembered offering to shovel the walk. I remembered the footprints leading into the cellar window. It took all of dinner, most of the time when I was falling asleep, some concentrated sessions when I woke during the night. By morning, when the sky was light again, I remembered it complete.
It had been my idea and then I had let Bobby execute it and then I had abandoned him. I left him there that day and in another story, someone else’s story, he was tortured or raped or even killed and eaten, although you’d have to be an adult to believe in these possibilities. The whole time he was in the McBean house I was lying on my bed and worrying about him, thinking, boy, he’s really going to get it, but mostly worrying what I could tell my parents that would be plausible and would keep me out of it. The only way I could think of to make it right, was to do as he’d asked, and to break into the cellar again.
I also got caught, got caught right off. There was a trap. I tripped a wire rigged to a stack of boards; they fell with an enormous clatter and McBean was there, just as he’d been for Bobby, with those awful cavernous eyes, before I could make it back out the window.
“Who sent you?” he shouted at me. “What are you looking for?”
So I told him.
“That sneaking, thieving, lying boy,” said McBean. “It’s a lie, what he’s said. How could it be true? And anyway, I couldn’t spare it.” I could see, behind him, the bottles with the unicorn label. There were half a dozen of them. All I asked was for one.
“He’s a wonderful boy.” I found myself crying.
“Get out,” said McBean. ‘‘The way you came. The window.”
“He’s dying,” I said. “And he’s my best friend.” I crawled back out while McBean stood and watched me, and walked back home with a face filled with tears. I was not giving up. There was another dinner I didn’t eat and another night I didn’t sleep. In the morning it was snowing, as if spring had never come. I planned to cut class, and break into the cellar again. This time I would be looking for traps. But as I passed McBean’s house, carrying my books and pretending to be on my way to school, I heard his front door.
“Come here,” McBean called angrily from his porch. He gave me a bottle, wrapped in red tissue. “There,” he said. “Take it.” He went back inside, but as I left he called again from behind the door. “Bring back what he doesn’t drink. What’s left is mine. It’s mine, remember.” And at that exact moment, the snow turned to rain.
For this trip I used the old window route. Bobby was almost past swallowing. I had to tip it from a spoon into his throat and the top of his mouth was covered with sores, so it burned him badly. One spoonful was all he could bear. But I came back the next day and repeated it and the next and by the fourth he could take it easily and after a week, he was eating again, and after two weeks I could see that he was going to live, just by looking in his mother’s face. “He almost died of the cure,” she told me. “The chemo. But we’ve done it. We’ve turned the corner.” I left her thanking God and went into Bobby’s room, where he was sitting up and looking like a boy again. I returned half the bottle to McBean.
“Did you spill any?” he asked angrily, taking it back. “Don’t tell me it took so much.”
And one night, that next summer, in Bryan’s Park with the firecrackers going off above us, Bobby and I sat on a blanket and he told me McBean’s story.
We finished school and graduated. I went to IU, but Bobby went to college in Boston and settled there. Sex came between us again. He came home once to tell his mother and father that
he was gay and then took off like the whole town burned to the touch.
Bobby was the first person that I loved and lost, although there have, of course, been others since. Twenty-five years later I tracked him down and we had a dinner together. We were awkward with each other; the evening wasn’t a great success. He tried to explain to me why he had left, as an apology for dumping me again. “It was just so hard to put the two lives together. At the time I felt that the first life was just a lie. I felt that everyone who loved me had been lied to. But now—being gay seems to be all I am sometimes. Now sometimes I want someplace where I can get away from it. Someplace where I’m just Bobby again. That turned out to be real, too.” He was not meeting my eyes and then suddenly he was. “In the last five years I’ve lost twenty-eight of my friends.”
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
“No. But if you mean, do I have AIDS, no, I don’t. I should, I think, but I don’t. I can’t explain it.”
There was a candle between us on the table. It flickered ghosts into his eyes. “You mean the whiskey,” I said.
“Yeah. That’s what I mean.”
The whiskey had seemed easy to believe in when I was seventeen and Bobby had just had a miraculous recovery and the snow had turned to rain. I hadn’t believed in it much since. I hadn’t supposed Bobby had either, because if he did, then I really had saved his life back then and you don’t leave a person who saves your life without a word. Those unicorn horns you read about in Europe and Scandinavia. They all turned out to be from narwhals. They were brought in by the Vikings through China. I’ve read a bit about it. Sometimes, someone just gets a miracle. Why not you? “You haven’t seen Mr. McBean lately,” I said. “He’s getting old. Really old. Deadly old.”
“I know,” said Bobby, but the conclusion he drew was not the same as mine. “Believe me, I know. That whiskey is gone. I’d have been there to get it if it wasn’t. I’d have been there twenty-eight times.”
Bobby leaned forward and blew the candle out.
“Remember when we wanted to live forever?” he asked me.
“What made us think that was such a great idea?”
I never went inside the toy store in The Hague. I don’t know what the music box played—“Edelweiss,” perhaps, or “Lara’s Theme,” nothing to do with me. I didn’t want to expose the strong sense I had that it had been put there for me, had traveled whatever travels, just to be there in that store window for me to see at that particular moment, with any evidence to the contrary. I didn’t want to expose my own fragile magic to the light of day.
Certainly I didn’t buy it. I didn’t need to. It was already mine, only not here, not now. Not as something I bought for myself, on an afternoon by myself, in a foreign country with my mother dying a world away. But as something I found one Christmas morning, wrapped in red paper. I stood looking through the glass and wished that Bobby and I were still friends. That he knew me well enough to have bought me the music box as a gift.
And then I didn’t wish that at all. Already I have too many friends, care too much about too many people, have exposed myself to loss on too many sides. I could never have imagined as a child how much it could hurt you to love people. It takes an adult to imagine such a thing. And that’s the end of my story.
If I envy anything about McBean now, it is his solitude. But no, that’s not really what I wish for either. When I was seventeen I thought McBean was a drunk because he had to have the whiskey so often. Now, when I believe in the whiskey at all, I think, like Bobby, that drinking was just the only way to live through living forever.
Falling Off the Unicorn
David D. Levine and Sara A. Mueller
SAILING in slow motion above the sand of the arena floor, Misty thought “This is going to hurt.”
Just a moment ago she’d been in the saddle, nudging Vulcan through a shoulder-in, concentrating on moving the unicorn’s right back hoof toward his left shoulder, getting him used to working in this building. It was new, still smelled of paint, and was making all the animals edgy.
And then some moron in the stands had lit up a goddamn cigarette.
Misty’s spur caught on the saddle as Vulcan whirled out from under her, alabaster coat and flaxen mane blurring past her eyes. She couldn’t get her hip under her and hit the ground on her left knee. It did hurt—it hurt like a sumbitch. She gasped from the pain, pulling in a breath full of shavings and manure dust as she rolled away from Vulcan’s sharp cloven hooves. The last thing she needed was an enraged four-hundred-pound unicorn stepping on her head.
Somewhere in the stands, she could hear her groom Caroline shouting. There was shouting all around, and the metal voice from the announcer’s booth called out “Loose unicorn, Harry, close the gate!” No one wanted a Persian stud running loose on the fairgrounds.
Misty kept one arm wrapped around her throbbing knee and the other over her head, but she could still see Vulcan rearing and pounding the rail with his iridescent hooves, making the hollow steel ring and tipping his head sideways to lunge through the rails with the double-edged spiral of his horn. His scream of rage echoed in the high hollow ceiling as he struggled to reach the offending smoker. Caroline pushed the stupid addict toward the exit, bellowing “Whoa, Vulcan! God-dammit, whoa!”
And the stupid beast whoa’d. He dropped right to his feet and gave a self-satisfied snort, pleased and proud that he’d defended his rider from the vicious cigarette. Misty rocked, holding her knee. Damn idiot animal. Caroline vaulted over the rail, dropped the six feet to the arena floor, and caught Vulcan’s reins. Crisis controlled.
Misty tried to sit up as the announcer cleared the arena. Brighter pain stabbed in her knee; it felt full of white-hot glass shards. She pushed herself up on her arms, spitting and snorting out sand and the ground-up shreds of old sneaker soles. Caroline walked Vulcan over, the animal placidly lipping her dark buzz-cut as if to say “Did I do good, boss?”
Caroline crouched down and cradled Misty’s knee in her hands, sliding her thumbs across the top of the kneecap. Only six weeks older than Misty, Caroline had always looked after her like a beloved little sister. She whispered under her breath, and a brief tingle of investigative magic slipped through the crackle of pain. “Can’t tell how bad it is, but it’s not broken. Think you can get up, blondie?” Though she kept her words light, concern tightened the skin around her eyes.
“I’d rather not.”
Caroline gave a little smirk and hauled Misty to her good foot.
“Ow!” Misty leaned hard on Caroline and hopped to keep her balance. That was a mistake—the injured knee screamed with pain at the jolt. “Sonofa—” But she bit off the curse, sucking air through her teeth and blinking hard. There were a lot of things that unicorn riders weren’t supposed to do, and one of them was swear out loud, especially not in front of an entire arena full of riders who’d love to see her disqualified.
Double especially not in front of Mary Frances Schwartz, the only other girl here with a real shot at the Nationals. Mary Frances was a barracuda in a double-A bra, five years younger than Misty’s seventeen and almost as tall. She’d be too tall to ride Persians next year, unless she turned out to be a “teeny little freak” like Misty. She sidled her own unicorn Angel over, threateningly close to Vulcan, who laid his ears back and arched up at the other stud. “Are you all right?” she asked with nearly authentic sympathy.
“It’s so sweet of you to ask,” Misty ground out through clenched teeth. At least two reporters were taking notes, so she couldn’t say what she was really thinking. She put one arm over Caroline’s shoulder and the other over Vulcan’s saddle, clutching the saddle horn as the three of them hobbled slowly out of the arena to the stable.
It took them almost ten minutes to cover the hundred yards to their stalls, Misty leaning into the lithe strength of Caroline’s body. Vulcan was limping too; maybe he’d hurt himself attacking the rail. The dusty fairground was painfully bright after the mercury-lit dimness of the a
rena.
Once they reached the shade of the stall, Caroline eased Misty onto a shrink-wrapped sawdust bale. Misty sighed and rested her head in the soft hollow of Caroline’s neck, smelling clean sweat and the cotton of her shirt collar. “Thank you,” she said, and squeezed her hand.
Caroline squeezed back for a moment, then pulled away and turned back to Vulcan. Misty felt a childish urge to pout—Vulcan had to be secured in his stall, but the knee didn’t hurt as much when she held Caroline’s hand.
Caroline unbuckled Vulcan’s bridle, replacing it with a halter cross-tied to each side of the open stall door. You never let that horn loose around people if you could help it. Once the unicorn was secured, Caroline brought Misty an ice pack from the trailer. “I told your mother those damn spurs were going to be trouble.”
“Since when does she listen to either of us?” Misty sucked in a breath as Caroline laid the ice pack over the ruined knee of her pink Wranglers. She didn’t want to let on just how much it hurt. “Anyway, it wasn’t the spurs, it was me. You’d never have lost your seat.” Caroline had grown too tall to show unicorns, but on a horse she was a study in long-limbed grace.
“I’m just the groom, shorty.”
Misty gave Caroline a mock glare. “I’m gonna hit five feet this year, you wait and see.”
“Dream on.” Caroline crouched by Vulcan’s front leg, inspecting the suspect hoof. “Looks like you’ve got a bruised hoof there, son.”
“Seriously, Caro, it should be you out there on Vulcan, not me. You trained him, after all. I just sit on him. He’s the proverbial push-button pony.”
“I’m too tall, and you know it. I can ride ’em, I just don’t look good on ’em.” She picked up Vulcan’s bruised foot and cupped it between her hands for a moment, muttering a healing charm like a prayer whispered in a lover’s ear. Vulcan let his head hang in the cross-ties, eyes half closed as the magic flowed through his injured hoof.