A Density of Souls (26 page)

“This has nothing to do with—”

“Let me finish,” Stephen said. “But the part no one talks about—

what makes the whole thing a symbiotic relationship—is that football players need fags, too.” He paused and swigged his beer.

“Football players are gods,” Stephen went on, “and gods need to be worshiped. And there is no better worship than another male swallowing your dick. Why? Because it’s total, absolute prostration. A little fag with no pride and no self-esteem sucking on your dick is richer worship than you can get from any cheerleader. Because men aren’t supposed to suck each other’s dicks, so when a man sucks yours, it means he’s giving you everything he has! And that is worship!” Stephen jabbed a finger into the center of Jordan’s chest.

“What does this have to do with Brandon?” Jordan asked, trying to keep his voice steady. He felt enveloped, sickened.

“Figure it out,” Stephen said without emotion.

“You and Brandon used to . . .” Jordan’s elbow slid off the bar as he sat upright, confronting Stephen head-on.

“Greg Darby?”

Stephen’s eyes met Jordan’s, but he wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t urge Jordan on. For Stephen to confess anything, Jordan would have to say it first. “So what does the fag get in the end?” Jordan asked, low 190

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enough not to be overheard. “The football player gets worship. But what about the fag?” Jordan asked, as dispassionate as he could manage, as if he were discussing physics.

Stephen didn’t smirk or look away. He seemed satisfied that Jordan had chosen to debate him point for point. “Validation,” Stephen offered. “Brief affirmation.”

“No love?” Jordan asked.

Stephen’s jaw tightened, his authority leaving him. Jordan leaned forward to whisper into Stephen’s ear, “Are you telling me there’s no possibility you could have gone with Greg Darby into that bell tower because you were in love with him?”

Jordan sat back on his stool. He felt that Stephen had known the entire time what he wanted.

When Stephen’s beer bottle shattered, both of them flinched.

The bartender spun around and slapped a rag down on the counter over the shards and foam. He swept the remains of the bottle into an ice container beneath the bar.

Stephen swabbed his hands across his thighs, leaving beer stains.

Jordan was struck by the strange beauty of the moment, by the abrupt vigor of Stephen’s rage. Stephen looked up at him, dazed, groping for words. “When I was a freshman, I stole a picture of you from school,”

he managed, his voice trembling. “I stole it and I took it home and I jerked off to it for the rest of high school. You want to know why? Because you were everything that was right with Cannon and everything that was wrong with me. And that got me off.”

He leaned toward Jordan. “And that is not love.”

Stephen released his grip on the bar’s edge, swung his legs to the floor, strode across the bar, and left Fat Harry’s.

Jordan parked the car in his driveway, cut the engine. Cold sweat had broken across his shoulders and was trickling down his back. After Stephen had left him in the bar, he had quietly drunk three more Crown and Sevens.

The Charbonnet residence was dark. Jordan entered the kitchen and gently shut the back door. He was even more careful with the door to Brandon’s bedroom, taking a full thirty seconds to click the door behind him. He sat on the edge of his brother’s bed.

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Stephen Conlin would tell him the truth, Jordan was sure of that.

But, why do I have to know? Jordan asked.

Maybe there was no finding or saving Brandon. But Jordan didn’t know if he cared anymore. He shifted his weight on the bed, studied the thick black shadow the bell tower threw across the wall. He wanted Stephen out of his head, his wide blue eyes and the mess of questions he stirred. Greg Darby had probably wanted the same thing.

But how far did Greg go?

Jordan turned onto his side, toward the window. A light was glowing inside the bell tower’s portico.

5

T
he grounds of Bishop Polk Cathedral were bordered by a cast-iron fence crowned with six-inch spikes. Jordan walked along the fence, out of the halo of street light. Beyond the fence he saw a black opening like a small mouth on the bottom side of the cathedral’s western wall, leading into a basement labyrinth of offices.

As he hoisted one foot on the fence’s crossbar, he swung his other leg between two metal spikes. It struck him that he was following the trail of Greg and Stephen. The spikes pressed his thigh like a vise.

Jordan swung his other leg up, shifting his weight over the top of the fence. He fell six feet into the shrubbery on the other side, toppling onto his side with arms and legs splayed out. He spat leaves and groped branches to pull himself to his feet. He found the open window to the church basement.

Jordan was blinded by pitch-blackness before his foot touched the top of a desk right beneath the windowsill. He stepped forward, expecting to hear the sound of pencils rolling to the floor. The desk’s surface was clear, though. He brought his other leg through the window and crouched on the desk, adjusting to the darkness.

For several minutes, he wandered the offices beneath the cathedral.

The sudden change in temperature indicated that he was entering a vaster space where the heat rose toward a high ceiling. He was in the foyer of the cathedral.

He shuffled into the middle of a patchwork of dim light cast down from nearly thirty feet overhead. Jordan gazed up into the interior of the bell tower’s shaft. The faint light came from a single bulb, its glow fractured by the portico’s uneven floorboards. He could see a human figure pacing back and forth thirty feet above, footfalls creaking the floorboards.

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“Stephen?”

He was frightened by how his hoarse voice resonated.

The figure overhead stopped pacing. Jordan backed up several steps and something hard grazed his left shoulder. He groped a splintered piece of wood. He realized he was holding the bottom rung of a wooden ladder.

He began to climb. Thirty feet up, the floorboards stopped and solid darkness outlined the bowls and clappers of three suspended church bells.

Jordan made it to the top of the ladder, where the top rung was secured with metal bolts in the shaft’s concrete walls. He hauled himself through the opening, before collapsing into a ball on the floorboards, gasping for breath. When he looked up, he saw Stephen.

Stephen opened a bottle of Bombay gin and swigged it as Jordan tried to get to his feet. Dizzy and breathless from the climb, Jordan sank to the floor, several feet from where Stephen sat in the frame of one of the portico’s arched windows, knees to his chest. The single bulb dangled overhead from a chain. Beyond Stephen, Jordan saw stars and the canopy of oak trees through the window’s wooden slats.

Stephen lifted the bottle, offered Jordan a sip. Jordan waved it away.

Stephen shrugged drunkenly, capped the bottle. His eyes moved to the slats.

“It started as a contest,” he said. “Before sixth grade, I think. Or maybe the summer after. Meredith was out of town on a trip with her mom, so me, Greg, and Brandon were all at Greg’s house one day and Brandon and Greg were laughing about how if you went up and put your dick in one of the vents in Meredith’s pool it felt just like a blow job.

“I didn’t say anything because I had never done it. They noticed I wasn’t talking so Greg wrestled me to the floor, teasing me. Brandon started yelling, ‘Stevie doesn’t know how to jerk off!’ so naturally I threw a fit and told them I did it all the time, which was a lie. I was afraid to touch myself down there.”

“Why?” Jordan asked.

“Because of what I thought about when I did.”

He took a slug from the bottle of Bombay. Jordan sat down cross-legged. The floorboards creaked beneath his weight. He tried to ignore the thirty-foot drop visible in uneven patches all around them.

“So Greg finally has me pinned to the floor and I’m screaming over 194

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and over again that I know how to jerk off, so finally . . . Greg . . . no, it was Brandon, I think . . . says ‘prove it’ and then just like that Greg hops off me and falls onto the bed next to Brandon. I stand up and I realize they’re both staring at me. Waiting for me to prove it.

“I’m not going to lie. I already knew some things. I knew Brandon and Greg both had this weird effect on me and that whenever they walked into a room I would change. I know it made Meredith angry but she never said anything about it.

“So anyway, I’m standing there and finally Greg says, ‘You have to take it out, stupid!’

“Brandon laughs really loud so I unzip my shorts and take it out.

They both go quiet but they still have these smug smiles. I was scared as hell but proving this was important, especially to them.

“So I take it in my hand and Brandon says, ‘Back and forth,’ but real calm, almost like a school teacher. So I start to do it and finally I get a rhythm going and they’re both just watching.”

Stephen paused and gulped a mouthful of liquor. Beyond him, the Garden District extended for blocks, dark interlocking oak branches beneath a dome of stars.

“I know it might not make sense, but we used the words fag and gay all the time. They don’t really have any kind of practical application when you’re in grammar school. Stupid things are gay, and people who say stupid things are fags. So, whatever, my point is that there didn’t seem to be anything ‘gay’ about what we were doing . . .

“So I’m doing it and I start to get goose bumps and then all of a sudden it was like . . . I thought, Oh shit, I’m going to pee. I shut my eyes and felt this burning. I didn’t want to open them because I thought I had pissed all over Greg’s floor. But then I heard Greg hit the floor on all fours and I open my eyes and see that he’s staring down at this white glob that landed three feet away from me. And then Brandon screams at the top of his lungs, ‘Jesus Christ, something came out?’

“I mean, I guess we knew what it was but we’d never seen it. They hadn’t. So that’s how the contest started.”

The contest. Jordan felt hollow at the word.

“The game was simple. Who could come first. But who could make something come out was the real goal, though. Brandon and Greg both wanted to make something come out. Every evening, once Meredith had to go home, we’d gather on Greg’s bed. Brandon would The Army of God

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lie against the headboard, Greg against the wall, and me against the footboard. Greg suggested that we take our shirts off. We all assumed that would be a good idea. Put us more in the mood or something.

The door was always locked because we were old enough to know that adults were really afraid of penises.

“Finally, one night, Brandon won the ultimate prize. It was quite a victory for a thirteen-year-old. He cursed and spat and jerked harder at himself before, I’d say, about three drops of come landed on his stomach. I always finished first, so I was just watching, but Greg was having a hard time with it. After Brandon shouted ‘fuck’ and came on himself Greg rolled his eyes. ‘For the love of God!’ he grunted. He had to be pretty upset if he used an expression we heard his mother use time and again. Greg sounded so pathetic Brandon and I just stared at him.

Greg was jerking harder, trying to coax the magic white stuff out of himself, but it wasn’t working.

“Brandon’s eyes had this sort of hazy, drugged look to them when he stared at me.

“ ‘Help him, Stevie,’ he finally said. I had no idea what he was talking about, but when Greg gave me this puppy-dog look I felt so bad for him I asked, ‘How?’

“ ‘Just help him out,’ Brandon said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Then, I understood what they were suggesting.

Everything inside of me turned cold. I was only thirteen, but I did realize at that moment that we were doing something bigger, important.

I remember how it tasted, and I remember Greg let out this sort of startled gasp when I finally had my mouth around him, and the sound of it made me sick. It was too human, too real, having a penis in my mouth, I guess.

“And then the sick feeling went away. Just like that. I shut my eyes and imitated the women we’d watched in the porn movies we stole from under Brandon’s . . . well, under your father’s bed. Those movies where the women moaned and loved it when they got fucked and we thought that was a miracle because we thought all females were like Meredith, always guarding their sacred secrets.

“So the sick feeling died. Forever. It would never come back. If it had, things might be very different from the way they are now.”

Stephen stopped and looked at Jordan. A car gently rushed by below them down Jackson Avenue.

“So then what?” Jordan asked.

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“He won. Something came out,” Stephen answered. “Suddenly, he stopped me. He put a hand on my shoulder and I stopped and Greg wrapped his fist around his dick and started pulling. It got on my face.

A minute passed and nobody said anything and then suddenly Brandon screamed, ‘We have a winner!’ ”

Jordan burst out laughing, the sound echoing through the portico, down the shaft. He doubled over, his hands on the floorboards in front of him. “I’m sorry . . .” he stammered through his guffaws. But Stephen was laughing, too, low, and under his breath. “We have a winner!” Jordan cried out, pumping one arm in the air triumphantly.

Gasping between laughs, Stephen accidentally knocked the bottle of Bombay from the ledge and it rolled across the boards. Jordan grabbed it, uncapped it, and drank.

He rose and moved to the ledge. Stephen slid his leg off the ledge to allow Jordan to sit across from him. Jordan handed the bottle of gin back to him.

Stephen took another drink. The gin washed his laughter away. He wiped his mouth with his arm.

“At the end of eighth grade, Greg called me. I rode to his house and he met me outside, pushing his bike out of the driveway, and his first words were, ‘Don’t tell Brandon, okay?’ I just nodded. I knew this was a big no-no. Meredith was a girl and the boys could do stuff without her, but two of the boys without the third? That was unheard of. Just like going to the cemetery without all four of us was unheard of, too.