Mysterious Skin

  “Time for some information on Neil,” Eric said. “He used to come here and get picked up by old men. Do you know what I’m talking about?” I shook my head. “Prostitution. Neil was a little whore; had been for quite a few years. He’d come out here whenever he needed money. The oldsters would get their rocks off and hand him a couple of twenties, boosting his ego somewhere into the stratosphere range.”

  The park sped past. “Wow,” I said. I’d thought only women could work as prostitutes; thought it only happened in the largest cities. The idea of Neil-as-prostitute seemed like a feature from the sensational TV programs my mother adored. I imagined a newscaster’s voice-over: “This teenage boy generates an ample amount of money for sex, and it all happens right here in the sleepy midwestern city of Hutchinson, Kansas.” Eric was watching me; I wondered what reaction he expected. I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Did you send him that letter?” I finally asked.

  “Oh, the one about you?” He looked at the dashboard clock again and steered toward Carey Park’s exit. “Indeed I did. Took me a week to finish. I doubt Neil will write back. But he knows who you are, knows you’re going to meet him when he comes home.”

  The park’s road intersected Reformatory Drive, and as we passed I could see KSIR and its four turrets. I noticed a shadow in the southwesternmost tower. The figure might have been my mother, standing guard over the grounds; although I couldn’t be certain, I reached over and honked Eric’s horn, then leaned out the window and waved my arms. It was something I did sometimes.

  When we got to North Monroe, Mrs. McCormick was sitting on her front steps. “There she is,” Eric said. Her hair fell across her face, the same color as Neil’s in the photograph. She looked a little wild, dark, very pretty. I instantly liked her.

  She trotted over to the car and squeezed into the backseat. Her hand reached forward, its fingernails painted pink, and I shook it. “Eric’s told me about you,” she said. “You’re an old acquaintance of my Neil?”

  “Sure am.” Then: “Little League.” Whatever Eric had said, I hoped he’d chosen to disregard the UFO story. Since she didn’t look at me as if I were crazy, I assumed she didn’t know about it.

  As for what I knew about her, Eric had sketchily detailed her job at a grocery store, her sense of humor, the fact that she drank. Like my mother, she was a single woman with a teenaged son, but Mrs. McCormick seemed unrestrained, more independent and feisty than my austere, workaholic mother. The two of them wouldn’t get along.

  Ellen McCormick seemed especially friendly with Eric, almost acting as if they shared critical secrets, or as if he were her son instead of her son’s friend. What did she know about him and Neil? And what about Neil’s doings in Carey Park? Perhaps it didn’t matter now. She leaned forward, her perfume oozing its nectar, her eyes scanning the ditches for identifying road markers. “Up here by this red barn, make a left,” she directed. “Go a couple of miles. You’ll pass some haystacks and a felled tree in the ditch.” She offered us black licorice whips, pushing them into the front seat as if she’d magically retrieved them from the air. “From the same batch as the ones we ate at Cheyenne Bottoms,” she told Eric. “I can’t get rid of this candy now that Neil’s gone.” I took one, and it slid snakelike from her fingers.

  Eric honked as he passed a hilly cemetery, its stone crosses and mausoleums outlined against the horizon. He drove farther into the boondocks. Hutchinson’s city limits disappeared behind us. “Here it is,” Mrs. McCormick said from the backseat; Eric steered into the ditch and stopped.

  The watermelon field—a flat, sandy plot lacking trees—was separated from the road by a damaged barbed wire fence. A sign, wired to a fence post, spelled out TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. We began trespassing regardless. I could tell the melons had seen better days: their leaves and vines had yellowed, with carcasses of fruit scattered here and there, exhibiting crimson wounds, ravaged to smithereens by raccoons.

  We crawled over the fence. “My father taught me—” I said, then stopped myself. No, that was not what I wanted to say. “Um, I know how to tell if a melon’s ripe. There’s a little coil where the fruit meets the vine. It turns brown, and the melon’s ready. I hate to say it, but these are rotten.” I sounded like my professors at the college, and I suddenly wished I’d shut up.

  Mrs. McCormick was unfazed. “I don’t need the meat,” she said. “Just the rinds. My neighbor lady taught me to make watermelon rind pickles. Ooh, they’re good. I could get drunk on them. Now, let’s get to picking.”

  I searched awhile. A scattering of pumpkins freckled the field’s far end; since Halloween was approaching, I robbed the three with the most intriguing shapes and carried them back to the fence. Good melons were harder to find. Still, I discovered some whose curlicues were brown instead of black; these I ripped from the vines and placed beside the pumpkin trio.

  Mrs. McCormick began whooping, her voice lilting in the air like a yodeler’s. She had spied a raccoon. I glanced up and saw her hightailing through the watermelon patch. She chased the coon, gaining on it, her speed almost superhuman. The stripes on the animal’s tail bobbed through the dying vines, and twice she leaned to try and snatch the tail, her feet sliding in the loose sand. Eric laughed, one hand clasped over his mouth, his eyes darting from Mrs. McCormick to me to watch my reaction. Just before she could snag it, the raccoon reached the pasture’s end and scurried under the barbed wire, secure at last. Mrs. McCormick raised her head, gave a final whoop, then turned back to us, exasperated.

  Eric calmed down and began wandering around lazily, stirring up clouds of dust. Neil’s mother returned to her previous spot and continued foraging for healthy melons. After a while, she looked up from the space where she was crouching and mock-frowned. She pointed to Eric and aimed her voice at the sky. “What to do with this one? He doesn’t want to work.” Then her finger pointed at me. “But this one,” she said, “is a keeper. This is the one my Neil will have to meet.” I wasn’t certain what she meant by that, but I liked the sound of it. She pushed a sugar baby melon with the flat of her hand, and it slowly rolled toward the fence, leaving a trail in the sand.

  After the watermelon afternoon, the weather became explicitly autumn. Eric began wearing a series of bulky black sweaters, his pale skin turning paler. I told him the sweaters looked comfortable. The following evening, when I stopped by the mobile home after class, he presented me with a blue one. “No need to think I’m in love with you,” he said. “I just wanted you to have this. A gift from a friend.”

  My mother was working overtime, so I invited Eric back to Little River. He fetched his tapes and a bottle of whiskey. I started to say, Don’t let my mother see that, but that sounded inane. I started to say, I’ve never been drunk before, and that sounded even more inane. I finally said, “Let’s go.”

  At home, my room was chilly, so I slipped the blue sweater over my head. “That’s better.” I chose a tape by a band called Breathless and blasted the volume. Eric uncapped the whiskey, took a drink, and delivered it to me. He began to search my closet, finding sheets of paper and a cigar box full of magic markers. Scribbled on the box, in my father’s handwriting, was 6¢ PER POUND. He had written that years ago, when Deborah and I had sold watermelons during the Kansas State Fair.

  We sat on the floor. I drank, trying not to wince. Eric took a large piece of paper and folded it into three sections. He explained a game he’d learned in art class: one person would draw a figure’s head on the first third of paper, then make guidelines for the body into the top edge of the middle section and pass it to the next person. Artist number two would draw the body, leaving guidelines for legs and feet. A third artist finished the figure.

  Eric handed me the folded paper. The head would be my assignment. “I know,” he said. “Draw an alien.”

  I frowned. “Is it in the rules that you have to tell me what to draw?” I began sketching a lightbulb-shaped noggin to appease him. The alien’s nostrils seemed bigger than the ones I remem
bered from my dreams. After I finished the enormous eyes and the mouth’s miniature slit, I took two more swigs of booze. It felt hot going down, a giddy fusion of fire and water.

  “Neil’s lips have touched that exact bottle,” Eric said.

  His turn. “I’m not going to tell you what to draw,” I said. I left him the pair of required lines so he could begin his body. He started in, taking twice as long as I had, nibbling his bottom lip in concentration. On the stereo, the band sounded especially melancholy. “There you are with your idiot ideas,” the singer sang. “More or less as far-fetched as mine.”

  When Eric had finished, he turned up the final third of paper. “Stupid me. I guess there’s only two of us.”

  I thought for a second. “Let’s pretend Neil’s here,” I said. “Do the feet the way you think he’d do them.”

  Eric drank. I drank. He chose a different magic marker, started to touch it to the paper, and stopped. “No,” he said. He slid the paper across the floor to me. “You do it. Based on what you know about Neil, based on what you remember, start drawing.”

  Neil’s appearance from the Chamber of Commerce photograph formed in my head, and I began from the lines Eric had traced on the paper’s last third. I concentrated on any scrap of evidence I’d discovered about Neil until the drawing was finished. My head felt disordered, and I knew I was getting drunk. I centered the paper between Eric and me, and we unfolded it together.

  First came my alien’s head, a picture nearly identical to the one Avalyn had drawn for the Wichita newspaper, its eyes slightly lopsided and overwhelming its face. “That’s good,” Eric said. His torso, a detailed representation of a skeleton, held a blood-dripping scythe in hand, its finger bones splayed at angles, its hipbone shaped like a fat heart. And the skeleton’s legs led into “Neil”’s—my—drawing of feet. Eric regarded it; said “and this is good, too.” I’d sketched a bowlegged form with knobby knees. The legs wore clodhopper, cleated tennis shoes, the laces untied. Next to the left foot were a baseball bat and a glove, the number ninety-nine written on its thumb. And next to the right foot, an oversized baseball. Across its surface, I’d written one word: COACH.

  Eric tapped a finger against the baseball I’d drawn. “Coach,” he read. “What’s this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I downed the remainder of the whiskey as if it were water. “I really don’t know.”

  I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I woke to the telephone ringing. I sat up from the floor, suddenly dizzy, my head pounding. I nudged Eric’s knee. “I think I’m drunk,” I said.

  “I think you are too,” he said. He staggered over to answer the phone.

  “Wait. It could be Avalyn. I still don’t know what to say. Just tell her I’m asleep or something. Tell her I’m not here.”

  Eric stepped into the hallway and positioned the telephone on my room’s floor. He wrapped his hand around the receiver and paused, thinking. Then he picked it up. “Hello.” I waited to hear what he said next. “Well, yes.” He was stammering. “Just a second. I’ll get him.”

  I mouthed, “Who is it?,” slightly panicking, since the clock beside me said 11:45. Shouldn’t my mother be home by now? I imagined her car in a crushed heap at the side of the road, her body lacerated by flying glass. I imagined a bullet from an inmate’s gun hammering into her skull.

  “It’s some guy,” Eric mouthed back. He kicked off his shoes, fluffed a pillow on my bed, and eased his head onto it.

  I crawled across the room and grabbed the phone. “Hello.”

  Silence. The person on the other end swallowed, took a deep breath. “Brian,” a voice said. “It’s me.” At first I didn’t recognize the voice, and I stared at Eric as he began to drift into dreamland.

  The voice repeated my name. This time, I couldn’t mistake the caller. It was my father.

  I hadn’t seen my father in three years, since the Christmas of 1988 when he’d visited Deborah and me, when he’d tucked a twenty-dollar bill into each of our fists and perched in a corner to watch us open gifts. And he hadn’t telephoned since last year’s Christmas. He’d forgotten both my graduation and my recent nineteenth birthday. For some curious reason—the fact I was drunk, maybe, or Eric’s companionship in the room—I felt uncommonly brave. I also felt angry. I wanted to scream at my father. I wanted to dig deep into the place where I kept all my feelings for him, all the pieces of dissatisfaction or rage or hatred, then stir them around, retrieve a fiery amalgamation, and throw them into his face. “What the fuck do you want?” I asked. That sentence almost hurt my mouth, as though it had been jimmied from my lips with an invisible blade, and when I said it Eric shot up from bed, his eyes widened toward me.

  “Brian,” my father said, almost scolding. My question had shocked him, too. Then his voice calmed and stationed itself. “I missed your birthday. You should get some—you know, some form of apology.”

  “I don’t need anything from you,” I said. I’d never spoken to my father like this. If I had mouthed off to him when I was little, he would have backhanded me. But now, woozy within this drunken fog, I had to do it. So much had happened since he’d last called, so many people and places and memories. My father had no connection with any of them. He knew nothing about me. I was no more his son than the boy that probably delivered his morning paper or the kid from the house next door in whatever city he now lived in.

  “That’s not true, son,” my father said. “You know, I’ve been meaning to visit you again, because we have so much catching up—”

  “Like hell we do,” I interrupted. Eric was standing now, head cocked in curiosity.

  “Don’t be angry with me. Please.” My father had said please to me, and it made me sick. “Just talk to me, son. I want to know how you’ve been, what you’ve been up to.”

  I felt on the threshold of something. For years I had wanted to ask my father what he knew about my missing time, and now, our telephones connected, I wondered how I could gather together the words for the question. “You do, do you? Well, here’s what I want to know.” I could hear his breathing, lucid and steady, and for a moment I saw my father’s chest rising and falling with each breath, his image absolutely clear, as if I’d only seen him yesterday.

  “Something happened to me when I was little,” I said. “Maybe you can tell me about it.”

  “What’s going on?” he said. “What has your mother—”

  “My mother isn’t here. She has no part of this. Right now I just want to hear from you. I’ve been fucked-up inside my head for so long, dear father”—on that word, Eric put his fingers to his mouth—“and since the last time you called I’ve been trying hard to figure out why. Maybe you can help. Maybe you remember that night years ago, when I woke in the crawl space. I was bleeding, and I was dirty, and I smelled horrible, half-dead. Do you remember that? Or were you upstairs, too busy sleeping, not caring a fuck about me? Do you remember how she took me to the doctor, and all you cared about was the fact that I wanted to quit baseball? And do you remember all the times I passed out after that, all the times I pissed the bed, with you never questioning why, only screaming at me for it? Do you remember that Halloween night a few years later, when I passed out again, and I knew something else had happened, and all you did was shrug it off? Do you?” I stopped to take a breath. My voice had elevated, becoming something I no longer possessed. And the words kept coming: “Could be that someone did something to me, on both those nights. Could be that someone tried to kill me even, or did even worse than that.” My sentences blurred together, and I wondered what he could understand of my ranting. “So what do you know, dear father? What do you have to tell me?”

  There was another pause, this one lasting entirely too long. My chest hurt—no, not my chest, my heart—and as I waited I realized the preposterous idea of this conversation, and I knew he couldn’t answer me.

  “I don’t know,” my father said at last. He sounded exhausted. “There’s nothing to say here. I can’t help you, Br
ian.”

  I started to slam the phone down, but that seemed one step too far. I figured I at least needed to tell him good-bye. “Good-bye.” I hung up before he could speak again.

  My hand throbbed. I looked down at it. Somehow I had grabbed the drawing Eric and I had made; had crumpled it in my fist. I let go, and the paper swelled a little, its wrinkles loosening. I could see Eric’s skeleton wrist. I could see a single, staring eye of my alien. I could see the C and the O from the word I’d written on Neil’s baseball.

  Eric lay back on the bed. He didn’t ask questions. A brilliant blue light shone in the window behind his head, but without investigating I knew it was merely the porch light from one of Little River’s homes. Only that, nothing more.

  “It’s just as I thought,” I said. “He didn’t do anything to me. It wasn’t him. He had nothing to do with it.” I stared at the telephone for what could have been hours. After a while, it seemed to crawl across the floor. I knew the hallucination was due to the darkness, to the bittersweet spell of the whiskey. I stretched my leg, rared back, and kicked the phone as hard as I could. It sailed through the hallway. A pure, almost miraculous second of silence passed before the telephone smashed against a door, the closed door to the room where my father had once slept.

  fourteen

  NEIL MCCORMICK

  Life in New York didn’t begin as planned: I suffered through a record-breaking four weeks—twenty-nine days, to be exact—without sex. “I always knew you had willpower,” Wendy said. I didn’t tell her that my abstinence wasn’t due to willpower, but to the crabs, which kept returning. I’d already administered doses three and four of Eric’s medicine from that day in Great Bend, a day that now seemed part of some other eon. Finally, with dose number five in mid-September, I’d decimated the crabs forever, free to do as I pleased.