Allan Stein (11 page)

"That
was
cold," this man said, announcing himself. "My hands are still numb."

I looked over my shoulder at him. Anything I could've said was dumb, so I screwed up my grin and shrugged.

"Looking for fossils?" he asked. He crouched beside me. The muscles around his knees looked the same as mine, only his legs were hairy.

"Uh-huh." I swatted a loose shard of rock with the flat of the hammer and it broke, predictably, into a billion pieces, so it was just dirt.

"My name's Larry," the man said. He took the hammer from me and shook my hand. Larry, like the possum who used to come in our house. I grunted, thinking of the possum, and flashed another screwy grin.

"Hi."

"You should use that pick when you're working on shale. Shale's really delicate." He ran his hand through the dirt. "It's like very dry mud."

"I did use the pick." We both looked at the dirt. "I mean earlier."

"Do you have a brush, a wire brush?"

"They're my mom's tools." I nodded toward the meadow where Louise was dancing along the creek, sometimes in the creek.

"A wire brush lets you remove layers from the shale without destroying any fossils that might've been preserved there."

"Mmm." What he said made no difference to me.

"What kind of stuff are you looking for?"

I stared at his shoes, which were also very cool, sandals that he wore without socks and had apparently worn right into the lake; I mean they were wet. "Can you hike in those shoes?" I asked, wanting also to know if I could have them please. I hated my shoes, nylon sneakers that looked like blue lozenges.

"What?"

"I hate my shoes. They're not even comfortable."

He undid the few straps of the sandals and handed them to me. "Try them on. They won't feel right since they're shaped to my feet, but you could get your own and break them in. Of course you can hike in them."

"Wow." What a swell guy. I undid my sneakers and pulled them off. The sandals were furry, soft, and they were smooth where
the imprints of Larry's feet had pressed into them—like polished fossils. I put them on and walked around a little and immediately got an erection, which didn't seem very important or weird just then. The sandals were the right size, almost, and the way his foot was shaped felt very cool against my foot.

"We're the same size," Larry said. "I mean almost."

I jumped around a little, making dashes and cuts along the rocks. Larry crouched beside the tools and watched me. I went a little distance toward the lake, leaping down rock to rock and then about-facing to work my way back up the tarn. I made a particularly fine jump and looked up to watch him watching me and there was Louise. She had surmounted the ridge and stood with Larry and the sandwich and the wine. They were talking.

"Look!" I shouted, but there was no especially interesting leap left to make and I simply sprang from one end of a rock to the other like some dumb little kid.

"That's wonderful, dear," Louise said. She handed the wine to Larry, and he drank it from the bottle.

I pointed back to where I'd been. "I can jump really far in these." I proceeded to spring back down the tarn feeling like a bird or Rocky the flying squirrel until I reached the edge of the lake. The shoes felt great. I was hot and wanted to make my shirt into a hat like Larry's, but now he and Louise were a million miles away, laughing and passing the wine back and forth. I ran back up the rocks to them.

"Let's make hats like Larry's," I announced, panting and out of breath.

"You've met my son, the athlete."

Larry and I both made stupid grins. "I'm really hot. Let's make our shirts into hats like Larry's."

Louise glanced at the bunched underpants hanging out of my pocket, but didn't mention them. My socks lay in a small pile where
they'd tumbled out."You're all sweaty again, darling boy. You should take another swim and then we'll eat our picnic in the meadow."

"Larry." I turned. "Show me how to make my shirt into a hat. We can go to the lake.You can come too, Louise, come on." They looked at each other and didn't answer me. I hated that. Louise smiled and took the wine from Larry. "You don't have to do anything, I mean just let's go down there, okay?" I wished a helicopter would come along and swoop them up in a basket and dump them down by the lake on the rock that I could see by the water, that nice flat rock where we could all stand if only they would move their feet, one after the other, and go down there.

"It's really easy," Larry said, taking the tied shirt from his head. "You just tuck the sleeves in and make knots at all the corners. Then you dip it in the lake."

I looked at him and then, fiercely, at Louise. They still weren't moving. I tugged my shirt off and gave it to Larry. "Come on, come down to the lake and show me." I crossed my arms over my nipples and could feel them harden against the soft inside of my wrists. Larry tucked the small sleeves of my white T-shirt into themselves and tied the four corners off so that I had a hat like his, only dry and too big for my head.

"There." He handed it to me. "Now you dip it in the water so it's wet and won't just blow off in the wind."

"You really ought to take another swim, dear, you're filthy. I'll show Larry the meadow and get the picnic ready. We'll feast, darling." I said nothing. I stared at them.

"I'll clean these tools off," Larry offered. My shoes lay in a heap between us, and Larry sat down and put them on his feet. Louise picked up my dirty socks, and then they started down the tarn to the meadow.

♦7  
♦

S
téphane woke me the next morning astride his bicycle, clever boy, rolling through my room with a tight turn by the bookshelf and a bump against the desk that woke me. He
click-click-click-clicked
past my bed and out the door again. “I have thought you were awake. You will excuse my joke of the bicycle.” He stumbled from it, wheeling around to park in the hall. “Per said you would like a guide to visit to the school with you."

"What time is it?" I made at show of stretching, so the boy would know I wasn't bashful. Did I smell? He clattered the bike into place outside my door. "Come back in and help me find my clothes and watch."

"Watch what?" Impertinent. I put a pair of instructive hands on his shoulders.

"
La montre, mon montre
. In English it is called a watch."

He shrugged my hands from him. "Why?"

"
Because I would like your help." Stéphane lifted the slim-banded timepiece from the side table where it had been in plain view all along. “Why ‘watch?’

"
Twelve-thirty? l slept fifteen hours?"

"The English is crazy." He tried the watch on his wrist, and it looked handsome, loosely bound beside the colorful braids of cloth he had tied there. ‘Per made a rendezvous for the school of three
P.M., and I will go with you for lunch and basketball and then for the school."

"How genial. Thank you. I don't play basketball."

"You will watch me."

"You like that?" I nodded to the watch. "You wear it today, see how it feels." The boy nodded and paused. A rush of blood or intelligence flushed through him, mute, barely visible, transforming his placid gaze into pinball-tilting calculations, and then he scrambled away without a word—up the stairs in a leap or two, scrape and bang of pulled drawers—and bounded back with a wadded black T-shirt in hand.

"You will wear this, and I wear the watch." The boy seemed pleased by the symmetry of the arrangement. The shirt smelled and was tight, but I pulled it on.
Metallica
in hideous faux-Gothic script bubble-foamed across my stomach beneath Beelzebub on a souped-up Harley. "It's good, yes? Good fit."

"Lovely." I made beach muscles. "Shows off my nice body."

"Yes. It's very good."

L
unch was
caviar d'aubergine
(smashed eggplant on pita bread) from a snack stand that gave us sticks instead of forks or knives, stir sticks, which Stéphane insisted were superfluous. "These pieces are luxuries," he said. "You put it in the mouth, you see"—he demonstrated the stuffing of the rolled pita into the mouth—"and you eat."

I nibbled at mine en route to the park. Lunch was
en plein air
,
et mobile
.
Le plein air
today was mawkish and brooding, indecisively gray but warm as bathwater.

"The spring in Paris, since it has fairly begun, has been enchanting." [This from another book.] "The sun and the moon have been blazing in emulation, and the difference between the blue sky of day and of night has been as slight as possible. There are no clouds
in the sky, but there are little thin green clouds, little puffs of raw, tender verdure, caught and suspended upon the branches of the trees. All the world is in the streets; the chairs and tables which have stood empty all winter before the cafe doors are at a premium; the theaters have become intolerably close."

We took a bus and I watched all the pretty sights while the boy kept his nose in a magazine (Pink Floyd
Les Rois du Rock
) despite my excited reports—"Quick, look, a charming Parisian bistro." We got off at the park. Cars crawled in the dull glare. Stéphane , star student of the Per school-of-blind-street-crossing, cut a clean path to the park gate, lunch in mouth, and I followed. His flapped blue knapsack looked smart and stylish, slung low off his shoulders. The great trees billowed, flaccid and waxen in the day's porcelain air, over pale green chairs and gravel paths. Four days, three visits to this park; I sauntered, I think is the right word, with the grace and carelessness of the habitue.

Stéphane looked smart striding past short-panted boys prodding their boats around the shallow pond with sticks. From the slung knapsack he produced his basketball, his emblem, and it was clear his purpose at the park was anything but childish. Small boys stared at the marvelous orange globe. Stéphane , his big hands all over it, said "scram" to the ones bold enough to step near. We arrived among the trees and the knapsack was dropped to the ground, the basketball spun in hand. An inner-city slouch (transmitted via music television) like some kind of dybbuk bled from gray tin air into this thin French boy's body and, split-second channel-change style, I found myself standing beside a jaded gang-banger (sweet-faced, just guessing really), scopin' for his homies.

"Stéphane ?" His wrist, dangling hipside, turned slightly toward me. "Are your friends here?" He nodded at the usual cluster of hand-slappers. "Mmm." A drab cabin/cafe sat opposite in a gravel plaza of metal chairs. "You know, I'm still a little hungry. I
think I'll watch from over there and have something to eat. Can I get you a soda or anything?" Birds rushed from the trees, pigeons, blotting the sky with their dirty flapping wings and soft underbellies. They lifted from the branches above the boys, who swooped and hollered like earthly birds as clumsy and doomed as the ugly pigeons who shit from the sky in parallel descending streams above them. The court was awful, really, cracked and uneven, and the basket was simply a metal ring welded to a sheet of steel. A handful of Africans, regardless of anything else about them, held the rest enthralled.

"Coke, please. In the can." He turned and smiled. I left to take up my primary role as audience.

The boy had brought his kit. He unpacked it solemnly: terry-cloth wrist bands, a string for the hair, small immaculate towel, ankle brace (the right), doubled-up socks matching under and over, plus the special shoes, wrapped in tissue, big as cats, which he laced completely (with one circuit around the back) and then tied. Other cooler boys wore theirs without lacing. It took him several minutes (Coke delivered in respectful silence, mid-lace), and he was neither rushed nor bothered. The sun, unlocatable behind dim overcast, made its way through the sky. The waiter was a flirt. He brought me the Coke with a smirk and stared while I fumbled through my poor French for an order.

" Recommendez-vous une sorte du vin particulier?"

"
Une sorte du vin?"
He smiled. I nodded, suspicious, even, of
oui.
"
Bordeaux.
Ça marche
"

"Bien. Un pichet."
I tried a face I had seen on Serge—bland disinterest—then one from Allan Stein—fierce disinterest, which pleased me more. A drowsy smoker slouched in his fatigue jacket, sprawled on paired chairs to my right. He watched the strutting boys. Stéphane stood to the side bouncing his ball, which was brighter by far than the game ball and gave a pleasant
ping-ping-ping
. The boy
feigned cynicism, when in fact he cared very deeply. Eight boys played while mothers ambled past with infants in strollers, common as wind or sunshine on this bland corridor of a day. One
maman
stopped and sat down beside me. She smiled and tended to her hidden infant. Stéphane , cross-court, glared, and I waved at him, happy to be noticed.

"Ton fils?"
this settling young mother inflected.

"Je m'excuse. Mon francais c'est pauvre. Je ne comprends pas."

"Yes, yes, I understand. Your son?" she repeated. Charming accent. The waiter arrived with what appeared to be a half gallon of wine, plus a napkin and glass (a slip of paper beneath the glass). He spat a nasty stream of French at the young mother, and she said something about pigs and flung a hand-clutched arm, and the waiter left. The smoker nearby slid deeper into his chair, eyes closed, bored.

"No, no, he's my—uh, cousin.
Cousin.
"

"Mmm. He's very beautiful." Said like a good mother. This one could have been his girlfriend at a small stretch; she looked barely out of her teens. We stared at the angelic devil/boy, all limbs and equipment, rubbing his great round fetish while the game went on and on without him. He dribbled for a bit, switching deftly hand to hand, then inspected the basketball minutely for flaws. Mother's treasured infant, still invisible amidst woolen wraps, slept silently and deep. "I would offer a cigarette, but obviously you don't smoke them."

"Thank you, no, I don't."

"Americans never smoke. Australians do, and the British naturally, but Americans don't even carry matches anymore." I pulled out a book of matches (
Shackles. Diverse Ales Since 1989)
and struck one with a little more panache than I had intended. Miss International Relations gave a tight smile and strolled to the neighbor table to bum a cigarette. What a marvel, the easy rapport of cafe society. Tiny roped children, two rows on a great linked leash, marched past
with a matron at the helm. A second leash led from her hand to a solitary dog, who leaped and yapped at a bag of treats. The children shuffled forward, silent as doomed Jesuits. Teen
maman
jogged the shoulder of our neighbor and took two cigarettes from him.

Stéphane at last managed to insinuate himself onto the court. In the wake of a victory, the four triumphant lay beneath a tree smoking while the losers argued. Stéphane dribbled out among them and tried some tentative heaves at the rim. His soft blue cotton shorts, baggy and low-slung so they tickled the tops of his knees, reminded me of water.

Last night in bed I had imagined him in shorts like these, piloting a bicycle across "our meadow" of flowers, the delicious mountain sun casting shadows in the folds of the garment. It shaped and shifted with his pumping legs. Mostly I thought of the shorts and the pumping, those long thighs a little warm but not exhausted. No shirt (as per monsieur's request), plus a glimmer of sweat along his heaving ribs. I followed on a second bike. This bedtime scenario got lost before it formed any trajectory. The boy just kept wobbling through the flowers, his legs in motion, over and over and over.

Just this side of sleep, echoes of my vision had gathered, a web of them bursting like carefully planned fireworks. At first these bursts obscured the boy, and then, dimming, they illumined him, brief visions that turned into a dream as I fell into sleep: (1) how intricate the nap of mosses became when I lay down in the meadow, face pressed to their carpet; (2) the poorly sung melody of "Eidelweiss" when my mother sang it wrong there; (3) how I heard the song in my head, always, for many days after; (4) that I could swim naked in the milky blue water hidden by pinnacled ridges where slides made a tarn (the water so frozen my bones ached), then lie on the rocks in the sun since Louise promised she would whistle before coming over; (5) the heat of the sun; (6) my fear of hornets and wasps; (7) the deeper heat, stretched out on the rock, jerking off,
eyes closed to the sky; (8) knowing the names of flowers (I have forgotten them); (9) the empty feeling of the car ride home at night, radio catching static and a Sunday hits countdown, along the black road; (10) how trees and animal eyes swept by headlights read like a movie in the dark; (11) my knees cupped beneath my palms; (12) not having to talk to be happy. Which is when I fell asleep.

No game yet, still idle milling, sizing up of some sort. The shorts arranged themselves against the boy's body, his smooth thighs striating with minor strain, legs leaping or muscling along through a gathering of foes. Miss Teen Mother sat and smoked, eyeing my wine, with her silent baby very silent beside her. Mr. Nod stirred and stared our way.

Beyond the boys and the trees, in the listless distance where gravel marked the park's main crossing path, the linked brats had been unleashed by matron and they clamored around a tired old donkey, the Sisyphus of donkeys, whose fate it was to haul cartloads of these tyrants from one end of the arboretum to the other. Unleashed by their keeper, the once docile victims became tiny monsters, aping matron's flat cruelty in shrill outbursts, practice for the grown-up pleasures ahead. In the great psychic economy of the French, the young victim waits graciously for someone weaker, on to whom he may pass the raft of cruelty that is his patrimony (the gift of parents, matrons, priests, and the like). This noble donkey was a practice ground for the young, his abuse and humiliation the child's first rehearsal for a satisfying grown-up life. Alas, the donkey had no easy return trip for the contemplation of his labors. There were always more pinching, poking children, another load to be packed and hauled, which fact lifted this beast's nobility far above the heights of his mythic counterpart. The donkey's labor was continuous, as if Sisyphus not only rolled the rock uphill but also delivered pizza to drunken college pranksters on his way back down, and I felt certain Albert Camus must have sat one day at this very
same unbalanced table, with the same half gallon of marching wine, observing the same ancient donkey.

Stéphane picked and pawed at the shorts, mere gestures, but his audience was appreciative. A game was emerging from the on-court milling. The four victors assumed their offensive positions, facing five hopefuls in some disarray. Our neighbor, Mr. Nod, strolled over and asked after
maman's
little baby.

At the foul line, the tallest of the winners, in bulky sweats and unlaced shoes, complained.
"Qui joue avec vous?"
He held the ball on his hip and his five opponents stared blankly back, accused, looking for one to sacrifice.
"C'est qui alors?"
Oh, Machiavelli could not have written a crueler scenario! It was plain as the bright stars pitched in the vault of heaven that nobility was about to surface and be made to suffer. Teen
maman
, chatting happily, lifted baby's woolly wrap and Nod gazed on her sainted sleeper. Good Stéphane , raised by intellectuals, stepped forward to assert the rule of law.

"J'attendais,"
he pointed out, claiming rights to the next game with a kind of endearing and archaic respect for fairness.
"C'est mon tour"
The others would shoot for the privilege of joining him. Mother pulled a little infant arm—no, not an arm, was that plastic?—from her bundle and gave it to Nod (which didn't keep her from hearing the crude on-court reply to my noble "cousin," some French curse that I understood only in the laughs that followed it).
Maman
shouted
"cochon de branleur, va"
at the boy's adversary, winning Stéphane a tidy second helping of shame and a parting shot, in poor English, from the adversary's short bent teammate, his Igor: "No next till this game's over, John Stockton." (A vile curse, I gathered from my boy's distress.) Stéphane slouched to the side of the court, furious, and the game commenced without him. Nod fumbled and a tiny hypodermic clattered to the ground beneath the stroller, which maman swooped up neatly and plunged back into her woolen bundle.