Mysterious Skin

  “No, you’re perfect,” Coach said. “Your expression—like you’re having a really great dream.” He sat in the beanbag beside me and fit his palm over my knee. He had bitten his nails, and one finger’s cuticle grinned a dried crescent of blood. “I think I like you better than those others in that book. You’re definitely a better ballplayer.” The hand on my knee tightened. It seemed faultless, the hand of someone amazing, superior, invincible. “Neil, I’ve been thinking about you a lot this week.”

  My face heated up. I squirmed from the beanbag, not wanting him to see it. “I’m hungry.”

  Coach stood and moved toward the kitchen. I followed. “Another pizza?” he asked. He opened a cupboard. “Or maybe you see something you like in here?”

  He’d stocked his kitchen with bags of candy, fudge cookies, Jiffy Pop popcorn, Tang, boxes of pudding. I spied a Breakfast Sampler Pack, miniature boxes of ten different cereal brands packaged together. “Mom never buys those things,” I said, pointing. “She says they’re a big waste of money.”

  “Let’s eat, then,” he said.

  I chose sugar Corn Pops. Coach, Cocoa Krispies. He pulled milk from his refrigerator and two spoons from another drawer. He positioned his fingers at each end of his box and faultlessly ripped it open. I tried to emulate, but when I tore, the box exploded. The cereal spilled across the checkerboard tiles. “Shit,” I said. Gold nuggets lay at our feet, their sugar coatings gleaming in the kitchen light. I started to apologize, but Coach shushed me. He held his box over his head. He tipped it. Cocoa Krispies rained down. I watched as he opened the Froot Loops, the Alpha-Bits, the horrible-tasting Special K we wouldn’t have eaten anyway. He spilled them all.

  The cereal scattered the floor. In the moment that followed, everything around me clarified. I stared at Coach, every detail of him, this grown man’s body standing before me. The kitchen’s light sharpened the thin blond hairs that curled from his shirt collar. The darker shade of his mustache. His sideburns, clipped level with his earlobes. The small copper-colored sunbursts that ringed each black pupil. And, inside that black, a reflection of my face.

  Coach’s hand reached for me. It clamped the back of my neck. I closed my eyes and felt him guiding me, regulating my actions, pushing me toward the floor. I fell to my knees, and he fell with me. “Here we go,” he said. I opened my eyes, and he was leaning over my body. Hundreds of cereal bits were strewn around us like debris from a catastrophe. My nostrils bristled with a perfume of sugar. He moved closer, and I smelled his breath, the clean scent of his Panthers T-shirt, the coconutty residue of his shampoo.

  He massaged my neck. “When I really, really like someone, there’s a way I show them how I feel.” He gently pushed my shoulders until I lay flat on the floor. He rested his head against my heart. I shifted under him, and pieces of cereal crunched beneath my ass. Snap, crackle, pop.

  I knew what was happening. Half of me realized it wasn’t right. The other half wanted it to happen. Coach hugged me, his fingers soothing and caressing, tracing and retracing the paths and angles of my shoulders, my back, my ass. “Shhh,” he said. “Angel.” His nose touched mine, and his breaths moved into my mouth. “There’s nothing wrong with kissing someone like this. Nothing. Don’t let anyone tell you there’s anything wrong with it.”

  He shut his mouth over mine, pushing his tongue between my lips, trailing the line of my front teeth, moving back to circle my own, smaller tongue. It felt as though his tongue were gorging my entire head, tasting and licking behind my eyes, tracing the blue lobes of my brain. Our teeth clicked together. His bottom lip curled over my jawline. My head was disappearing, he was swallowing me. I moaned and understood it was the right noise. Alfred and Mom made that sound at night.

  Occasionally I’d open my eyes, catch a random image, then snap them back shut. The images shuffled in my head: his fingers, loosening his circle-and-horse-head belt buckle; teardrops of green glass on the chandelier; his shirt’s pouncing, drooling panther; silver fillings in the recess of his mouth.

  He stretched on top of me. More snaps and crackles. My hand made a fist against the linoleum, and my palm burst pebbles of cereal. The tongue kept darting inside my head. Trails of his spit dripped down my throat. I swallowed.

  His head lifted. “Shhh.” He unzipped, and somehow managed to wriggle his jeans to his knees. His dick stiffened against my thigh. “Open your eyes and look at it,” Coach said. I did. At that second I would have obeyed anything. His dick curved slightly upward, a milky drop leaking from its tip.

  “Neil, I like you so much.” His eyes resembled chunks of stained glass. He kissed me again, and one hand wandered up my leg, rubbing my crotch through my baseball pants. “That feels nice, right?” He squeezed, ironed, massaged. “Right?” Yes, it felt nice. I heard something that sounded like fabric ripping. He reached inside my baseball pants. He grabbed my dick, the sweat of his palm almost stinging me. I focused on a vein in his bicep. The vein twitched like a puppet’s vulnerable string. My body tensed, canting against the support of his other arm, nearly nine years of anticipation clamping in each tendon and muscle. I couldn’t hold it. I moaned again to let him know, and then he shuddered. His entire body shook. He quickly pushed himself up to kneel over me, and in that second I saw the full size of his dick, candy pink and unreal, as it arched over my chest. His sperm shot from the head and pooled its white dribbles across the ninety-nine on my jersey front. It shocked me a little, but I kept quiet. After a while, I put my palm over the puddle. The come felt warmer and stickier than I’d expected. Beneath it, my heartbeat steadied.

  He lay back down. He wore an awkward, pained expression, and when he sighed into my face, I could almost taste the heat in the rushing air.

  “You liked it,” Coach said. He wasn’t looking at me. “It’s okay that you liked it, it will all be okay.”

  Minutes passed. I counted the number of my breaths before either of us spoke. I was on sixty-five before Coach said anything. What he said was, “Shhh,” again, although I hadn’t said a word. I started shivering, and Coach hugged me, covering as much of me as he could, as if my skin had burst into flame and his body were a blanket to snuff it. Only my mother had held me like that.

  “That’s how I feel about you,” Coach said. “There’s nothing wrong with showing it. People are afraid to show it, but you should know there’s nothing wrong with expressing to someone how much you really like them, how much you’re proud of them.”

  I looked at the floor’s mess: two spoons, a pearly bead of his come, and cereal nuggets in all colors, as if a kaleidoscope had shattered. I swallowed. The taste of his tongue seared my mouth.

  He zipped up. It happened, I told myself; it happened. And I had liked it. I heard dogs barking outside, a group of kids fighting in clipped sentences. “I’m telling,” one bawled. Coach dropped a five-dollar bill on the floor beside me, then stepped over my body, a black smudge from my sunblock on his shirt front. He hunched over the sink and twisted the H knob. The water splashed his hands. “I’ll clean the floor later.” He smiled at me. “My number ninety-nine. Guess we should think about heading over to smear that Taco Hut team.”

  We demolished Taco Hut. Somewhere within those seven innings I smacked three RBIs, but I don’t remember a moment. I saw his hands giving signals from the coach’s box on the third base line, and I thought about our sex. Although it was difficult to understand it then, what I wanted was more. For the rest of my days I would want it. I would see sex everywhere, splinters shoved into each molecule of each space, saturating everything I saw and smelled and tasted and touched.

  I could leap ahead and detail the afternoons I spent with Coach, the money he gave me, everything I learned from him. I could mention the summer’s end, the beginning of third grade, the following June when the Chamber of Commerce assigned Coach another, older group of boys. Without a guide, I would quit baseball. Our paths would trail further and further away, and our relationship would end.

  But he’s
still here, in a way I can’t explain. Oftentimes I wonder where Coach lives, what he’s doing, whether something like prison or lynch mobs or disease hasn’t killed him. But looking back it doesn’t matter. What matters is how, for the first time in my life, I felt as if I existed for something. When I think back, and I do that a lot, the majority of that summer fades. I barely remember the vacation Mom and I took to Abilene, or her breakup with Alfred. I almost forget the other boys on the team, even the others Coach lured to that house across from the fairgrounds marquee.

  Sometimes it’s all I think about: the times I spent with him. It’s as if he and I were all that mattered. My best dreams feature him, no one else, the two of us suspended in his sugary-smelling rooms, alone, as if God had positioned a beam on central Kansas, and Coach and I had stepped haphazardly into its light.

  three

  BRIAN LACKEY

  Summers, my father raised watermelons. By September, they matured into ripeness, the salmon pink of their flesh deepening to vermilion. Before the morning’s temperature moved above eighty, my father tramped between the vines, knife in hand, and carried watermelons to the house. Our family ate so much of the fruit, our veins might have contained a concoction of blood and melon juice.

  Little River lies nestled one mile off Highway 56, and every autumn my father set up a fruit stand to attract the profusion of cars that drove to and from the yearly Kansas State Fair, held twenty miles away in Hutchinson. He appointed Deborah and me to oversee the truckload of melons. “You sell the goods, you make the money,” he’d say.

  One summer—two years after the summer of our UFO—my father decided we could sell unchaperoned. On the fair’s opening morning, he parked the pickup in the gravel shoulder where the Little River road met the highway. He lifted himself into the cab and repositioned the melons, scattering the common, striped kind among the black diamond and pint-sized sugar baby varieties. He handed us an old Roi-Tan cigar box in which one-and five-dollar bills were peppered with handfuls of change. He gave us the thumbs-up and turned to walk home.

  Deborah and I perched at the end of the truck bed, watermelons bubbling around us in a pell-mell sea. I felt important, like a merchant opening shop. While she weighed each fruit on a rusty scale, I multiplied the number of pounds by six cents and Magic Markered the price on each rind.

  Our first customers coasted toward us: an elderly couple and their three grandchildren. The red frames on the woman’s sunglasses matched the color of her smudged lipstick. She seemed frazzled and desperate. “We’re spending loads of money on all those silly games and rides at the fair,” she explained, “so we might as well spend even more on your melons. Better for the little ones than cotton candy or funnel cake.” She tested a fat one’s ripeness by thumping her fingernail against it. Then she scratched its rind and checked the color. Deborah rolled her eyes. Our father had shown us the secret of telling if a melon was ready: a thin, curly filament wormed where the melon met the vine; when that turned brown, the fruit was ripe. We didn’t relay our secret to the woman. We let her thump until she made her choice. Deborah weighed it. “Harold, give them two smackers,” the woman said, and her husband paid us.

  All summer, the sun had lightened my hair, and Deborah’s had bleached to the color of chaff. By noon that day, my hair had dried out, and my skin was tingling. I knew I’d be sunburned by evening. “We forgot suntan lotion,” I told Deborah.

  She pressed her thumb against my shoulder. It left a white impression for half a second before the pink returned. “You’ll look like a lobster,” she said. I remembered the previous summer, when we had taken a trip to Kanopolis Reservoir and I had fallen asleep on the beach. Sunburns made me nauseated. If I got sick, my father wouldn’t let me sell the next day.

  Deborah’s best friend, Breeze Campbell, bicycled to the highway and joined us. She hadn’t brought suntan lotion, either. She suggested we eat. I found a knife behind the seat in my father’s cobwebby pickup, the same knife he’d used to sever the turtle’s head, two years before. I chose a watermelon, strummed the gauze of sand from its surface, and aimed for its “1.25” price. Stab. The melon split in jagged halves, and we dug our fingers into the meat to gobble it up.

  I was always shy around Deborah’s friends, but as we ate I grew bolder. I stood beside the pickup, stuffing fistfuls into my mouth, making certain they were watching me. I didn’t swallow. Instead, I punched both my swollen cheeks simultaneously, juice and seeds exploding from my mouth across the pavement. Breeze laughed. She hopped from her seat on the scale and joined me, repeating my actions.

  The three of us waited for cars to speed by, then “vomited” watermelons across the highway. After a while I got carried away. I selected melons from the pickup bed, lifting them above my head and dropping them. They burst on the asphalt, echoing identical splotch sounds across the fields. In minutes chunks of pink meat, scraps of rind, and slimy seeds littered a stretch of Highway 56. Flies hovered around the mess as if it were an animal’s carcass.

  Deborah stopped laughing. I turned and saw my father. He had showered, dressed, and slicked back his hair, undoubtedly planning to drive into Hutchinson for softball games. The sun shone off the oil in his hair. He pressed both palms against the sides of his shorts, the fingers splayed out stiff and trembling. Breeze cleared her throat and began walking her bicycle up the road.

  I could never predict my father’s reactions. He would comfort my mother one minute; slam the door in her face the next. On that day, my father didn’t hit me. He looked toward the east, then the west, for cars. The horizons were clear. He stepped toward the debris and began tossing pink clots of melon into the ditch. When he came to a piece of rind, he held it up and examined the price Deborah had written. “Dollar eighty-five,” he said. He pitched another mess of pink. He found another rind: “Two fifty. A big one, Brian.”

  When my father had finished, only a stain remained on the highway asphalt, a burst of juice shaped like a star with countless points. He shuffled to the pickup and leaned against its side. I watched his hands. A fly landed on the left one, wriggling its spindly legs. He shooed it away and knocked a knuckle on the Roi-Tan box. “I’ll be back around seven tonight.” He smiled at Deborah, his eyes blinking mechanically. “Your brother owes me twelve dollars and forty cents.”

  In the two years following the night my mother, Deborah, and I saw the UFO, I became obsessed with watching the skies. I began stretching on the roof on summer nights. I went there alone; Deborah had grown exhausted with playing board games, but I didn’t mind. I memorized the moon’s phases and various constellations, and searched through binoculars for any hint of abnormal light.

  I scanned newspapers for flying saucer stories, and on occasion I’d discover some brief bit about eerie lights over a city or a curiously shaped craft pursuing an airplane. I fantasized myself as the world’s first adolescent UFO researcher, clandestinely funded by the U.S. government to jet between countries, gleaning information. I borrowed books from the library; examined their sketches and rare spacecraft photographs.

  Halloween approached. I’d wanted to dress as a spaceman, but my father balked at the costume’s expense. “My paycheck will not be spent on this foolish holiday.” I had to settle for the cheaper Satan. At October’s close, I dressed in cranberry-red sweatpants, suspenders, and rubber galoshes. “I feel dumb,” I told my mother.

  Back then, Deborah and I attended church weekly. For Halloween, we had helped decorate an abandoned house three miles from town. Our Youth Ministry was sponsoring a Haunted Mansion to amuse kids after they’d finished that night’s candy grabbing. My Satan getup made me feel gutsy for once—the kids that picked on me at school wouldn’t recognize me, I thought—and I anticipated lurching from a dark corner to scare them.

  I remember beginning the night in Little River Lutheran Church. Deborah and I searched for candles, and as I tiptoed past the pews, my tail bobbed behind me. I lumbered forward as devillike as possible, rehearsing for the night a
head. The stained-glass windows shimmered their faint blues and golds, and I kept imagining the hand of God would slide aside the steepled roof to pluck away my mask.

  Deborah stood beneath the crucified Christ. Moonlight angled through the stained glass to illuminate the green warts she’d rubber-cemented to her face. She was dressed as a witch and had dyed her hair red for the evening. Its shade matched the painted blood that dripped from the Savior’s wounds. “Your mask’s almost sacrilegious,” she said as I emerged from behind the altar with the candles. “How perfect.” She’d stopped believing in God months ago. She claimed she only continued with church because it gave her a chance to stare at Lucas Black, the pastor’s eighteen-year-old son.

  My father honked from outside, where he and my mother waited in the pickup. When the four of us squeezed together in the seat, my parents looked uncomfortable beside each other. Deborah and I should be between them, I thought.

  “I’ve got to be on the job in twenty-five minutes,” my mother said. Her uniform was the color of rye bread. Her gold badge spelled out M. LACKEY. KANSAS STATE INDUSTRIAL REFORMATORY patches covered each shoulder.

  “Got to drop these two off first,” my father said. Our truck passed the YOU ARE LEAVING LITTLE RIVER, KANSAS! COME BACK AGAIN! sign. He turned onto the abandoned road that led to the Haunted Mansion.

  I checked my mask in the side rearview and adjusted one crooked horn. My breath slivered from the slit in my fleshy maroon lips. I wore new wire-rim glasses beneath the mask, the ones Deborah swore made me look like an owl, the ones kids at school had already teased me about. To get a better look in the mirror, I cracked a window, and Deborah’s hat fell off, her red hair flying back. “Close it,” she said. Her mouth displayed a blackened front tooth.