Keeping Promise Rock (8 page)

“No,” Crick said numbly, wanting to give her whatever comfort he could manage. If her problem was that Crick was Mexican, well, he could put her mind at rest. “Brian and I were friends. We had the same classes, Keeping Promise Rock

and we both liked art, and we had to be gay in this dumb town, that’s all.

We were never… you know, together.”

He was unprepared for the crack of her hand across his cheek, or for her to scream “Faggot!” in his face with full force and spittle.

But by the time Deacon pulled up in front of his house after a tense, sorrowful, and silent drive, the numbness had worn off, and he was a little bit prepared to find all his belongings slagged on a blanket on the front lawn.

“You stay in the car,” Deacon said quietly. “I’ll start packing. Here.” He pulled out his cell phone and handed it over. “You call Parish and tell him to get your room ready. He’s been waiting for this to happen since you were nine.”

Crick made the call and left a message, watching distantly as Deacon started to stack his books together. He saw a white flutter, and Deacon lurched after it as it flitted across the yard like a hurt bird. Crick realized what it was and belatedly threw himself out of the truck to get it before Deacon did—and before it became public property in general.

Deacon got to it first.

He stared at it blankly in the glare of the headlamps and then blinked. A faint smile touched his square-jawed face, and he put the paper gently in Crick’s hands.

“That’s real good, Crick,” he said, his voice kind. “Goddamned beautiful, in fact—but you’ve got to know, it’s not really me.” It was a picture of Deacon, sitting on Promise Rock, from Crick’s perspective, sitting below him. He was looking out over the water, his chest bare, his shell necklace—the one that Crick had given him for Christmas five years ago—making him look vulnerable somehow. Crick had drawn what he saw—he couldn’t be responsible for the aura of kindness, of strength, of beauty that seemed to surround Deacon without his knowledge.

“Of course it’s you,” Crick said, puzzled and a little relieved.

Deacon thought it was good. “You remember that day.” Deacon looked unhappy and turned to picking up Crick’s clothes, wrapping them in the comforter from his bed. “Crick, someday, you’ll get the hell out of here, and you’ll see that I’m just a guy. I’m not that special.

I’m not the man in the picture. I’m flattered….” He stopped for a moment, and a shudder seemed to pass through him. “I’m more than flattered.

I’m….” He looked away, and for a moment, he looked unbearably young and terribly vulnerable. “I wish more than anything I could be the guy you drew there. I wish more than anything I’d never have to let you down, but….”

He looked at Crick beseechingly, and Crick wished they were having this conversation in broad daylight, because he couldn’t for the life of him read Deacon’s face. It looked something like hunger, and it looked something like denial, but mostly it looked like hurt.

“No one could live up to that picture, Carrick. No matter how bad I wish I could always be your hero.”

Crick turned a naked face to Deacon, not caring if he sounded or looked weak, not caring if Deacon wanted him or wanted a little brother or just wanted a stable muckraker.

“Just promise me you’ll always love me, Deacon,” he said rawly.

“Just promise you’ll never throw my stuff on the lawn and tell me I’m not good enough. You want to be my hero, that’s all you got to do.” Deacon smiled a little, something shadowing his eyes that Carrick couldn’t even guess at. “Sure thing, Crick—as long as you promise to write us when you get the fuck out of here. Is that a deal?” Crick swallowed and nodded, leaning into Deacon’s strong hand on his shoulder. It didn’t occur to him that Deacon expected him to leave. It certainly didn’t occur to him that such an occurrence would break Deacon’s heart.

Someone once called fate “the only cosmic force with a tragic sense of humor,” and Carrick would have agreed. Once again, the thing, the big obvious thing that didn’t occur to him at the outset, managed to make its presence known in the most painful way possible, with Crick as a witness.

Making Promise Rock

IN THE middle part of Crick’s senior year, it all looked golden. Thanks to living at The Pulpit
,
Crick’s grades had improved, he’d submitted his portfolio to some art schools down south, and he was even looking to get some scholarships to help him out. Parish and Deacon had surprised the hell out of him on his eighteenth birthday in January when they’d presented him with a bank account that they’d been adding to since he was nine years old. (How they’d gotten his social security code from his mother was a story neither of them would discuss, but he would be forever curious.)

“Did you think you were working for free all that time, boy?” Parish had asked with a laconic smile on his long, weathered face. “We may be running on a shoestring, but we do manage to pay our muckrakers a little something!”

“A little something” was enough for a couple of years at school, and Crick had wanted to cry.

So he was unprepared when, about a month later, Patrick skidded the truck into the high school parking lot during passing period, jumped out, and cast wild eyes around the milling students. He just lucked into seeing Crick before he disappeared into the art building, and Crick ran down to him, heedless of the stares.

He’d gotten used to stares and whispers in the last two years—but no one would touch him, not anymore. The mystique of having a “boyfriend who died” managed—just barely—to put a blanket on the rampant 52

homophobia running through Levee Oaks High. It had been a lonely two years, but since Crick went home every night to The Pulpit
,
he’d been able to bear them just fine. In fact, he’d have said they were the happiest of his life.

“Patrick.” The man’s round, creased face was red and blotchy from tears, and his habitual baseball hat was missing, leaving patchy, sparse hair flying in the February wind. “Man—what the hell’s wrong?” Patrick shook his head, unable to speak, and Crick started to panic.

“Oh God—Patrick, is it Deacon? Has something happened to Deacon?”

Patrick passed a hand in front of his eyes and shook his head again—

this time a definite “no.”

“No, boy—I was hoping you’d seen him, that’s why I came by. I….” He looked apologetic, but it was clear his heart was broken, so Crick was ready to forgive him anything. “This is a hell of a way to tell you, Crick, but I’m so worried about Deacon, and I wanted him to tell you himself, but now I just want to know he’s okay!”

Crick knew this feeling—oh sweet Jesus, he knew this feeling. “Oh God, Patrick… what happened?”

Patrick swallowed and nodded absently at Crick’s art teacher, who had come outside to see what the deal was with the stranger on campus.

“It’s Parish, Crick—he was working Evening Comet this morning and he just….” Patrick’s voice broke completely. “He just dropped. I called the ambulance and Deacon got there and there was his father, and…

Crick, he was dead—hell, before I got to him he was dead. Just gone.” Crick’s vision went sort of an icky pewter gray, and he heard Ms.

Thompson talking to him from the bottom of a well. “Where’s Deacon?” he asked from that same well, and Patrick’s weathered hand clamped on his arm and sat him in the open side of the truck.

“That’s why I’m here, Carrick—that boy…. You see, the coroner got there, and they got Parish on the gurney and Deacon….” More tears.

When he was nine, Crick would have said this man couldn’t cry, but he sure could laugh. Now he wasn’t sure if Patrick would ever laugh again.

“Deacon said ‘Daddy?’ and it was the same voice he used when his mama was put on that same damned bus. Then he… he was just gone. Jumped on Keeping Promise Rock

the back of that three-year-old. Damned horse was just milling around the yard, I was so tore up. It’s been an hour. Crick… I’m so worried.” Parish? Deacon’s dad—the first person to ever stand up for Carrick for anything at all? The man who’d greeted him every morning with coffee and breakfast—hell, even just Pop Tarts—and asked him what he was doing that day?

And to watch him and Deacon talk—about horses, about movies, about the state of the world—it was like a textbook on hope, about what family should be to each other.

“Oh Jesus,” Crick mumbled, climbing out of his own misery for the first time in his life. “Deacon. Patrick, we’ve got to find him!” Lucky for Crick, he had an idea of where to look.

Patrick had a key to the gate of the adjoining property, and as the truck jounced along the rough track towards Promise Rock, Crick tried to man up for whatever he might find there—even if what he found was no Deacon.

But Deacon was there.

They saw the horse first, and Patrick shoved the truck keys into Crick’s hands as they walked around the irrigation stream toward the narrow end, where a little bridge sat for convenience. Since Crick had been there mostly in the summer, he couldn’t remember ever using the bridge—when it was a hundred and five degrees in the shade, it was easier just to swim across—but he sure was grateful for it now.

“I’ll take Comet back,” Patrick murmured. “He’s going to need you.”

Crick doubted it. Deacon needed a grown-up. A mother or a father or… hell, anyone but Crick, who had been successfully fucking up his own wet dreams since he’d been having them.

Still, Deacon looked happy to see him when he hoisted himself up to the top of the boulder and plopped his ass down on the cold granite.

“Hey, Crick,” he said with a faint smile. “Getting out of school again?”

“Yeah.” Crick swallowed, hard. “You know—slacking as usual.” Deacon nodded, still staring off into the vacant field on the other side of the swimming hole. It was green with the winter rains, which had been plentiful, for once. It had almost flooded this year—always a worry in this 54

area of Sacramento—but the rains let off at the last moment, and everybody had let out a collective sigh of relief. Didn’t mean they weren’t due, just meant they weren’t due this year.

“In about a month,” Deacon said absently, “this whole field will be a riot of flowers… those yellow ones that make the air smell good. I love that time.”

“Me too,” Crick told him. He had the field of flowers in his sketchbook, but since he had done it in charcoal and not watercolors, it didn’t really sing.

“My mother drank herself to death, did you know that?” Deacon’s voice was so remote and empty that it took a moment for the words to sink in, and Crick’s lungs almost froze with sudden pain.

“No,” he said, looking at Deacon in horror. “I didn’t know that.” Deacon nodded. “Parish was starting the ranch, and he was working a job to make the payments and then coming home and working the horses and… and she would get so lonely.”

“She had you,” Crick said, not sure how you could leave a baby like that, no matter how lonely you were.

“I was little—Parish said I was pretty self-sufficient. I could dress myself, make a sandwich, it was no big deal. And she was good about it.

Waited until I was down for a nap or when I went to bed, and then she’d just… drink. Steadily, for about three hours and Parish got home and she’d be passed out on the couch. And then she got sick—her liver started backing up, and she ended up in bed. We didn’t have health insurance then—and, you know, she wouldn’t stop drinking.”

“Oh God, Deacon… I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.” Crick had always had sort of an idealized vision of Deacon’s late mother—her picture on the mantel had been a dreamy, soft-focus female version of her son. He’d thought she’d died of cancer, or pneumonia or….

Or anything but the same thing that made step-Bob throw whiskey bottles at him when he wasn’t quick enough to duck.

Deacon shrugged like it was no big deal, like everybody knew and Crick hadn’t had to find out on the worst day of their lives. “Yeah… well, the thing is, after Parish came home and found me in the stables, I kept asking him when he was going to go away. I figured if she could, then he could, and I just wanted to….”

A hiccup then. A real, honest to God hiccup of humanity, a sudden closeness to that distant, nobody-home voice.

“Just wanted to know, right? So I could be ready, because I wasn’t ready that time. Parish told me… he said he would stay with me as long as he possibly could. Until God dragged him away by the heels, kicking and screaming the whole time.”

Jesus fucking Christ. Crick pushed himself up on the rock and reached a tentative hand to Deacon’s thigh. He was not prepared for Deacon’s death grip on that hand, but he did scoot up closer so they were touching shoulders. Deacon tilted his head a little—Crick had finally reached that four inches taller than his hero—and Crick sighed as his shoulder took up a little bit of that weight.

“The bastard didn’t drag him off, Crick… he took him by surprise.

You know that’s the only reason Parish would leave us, right?” Crick nodded and wiped his wet cheek on Deacon’s sun-streaked brown hair. “Yeah, Deacon. He got ambushed. Wasn’t fucking fair.”

“No,” Deacon’s voice finally cracked. “Wasn’t fucking fair at all.” Deacon wiped his face on his shoulder, and Crick held up a hand to brush the tears off his cheek. Deacon captured Crick’s palm and held it to his face with a shaking hand, rubbing against it like a skittered colt. “Oh God, Crick… you’re the only family I’ve got left. You’re like the only person on the planet, tethering me to its crust… and you’re going to have to leave me too.”