Skinned Alive (2 page)

“It can push one hundred and ten,” Otis said.

“Oh, sure,” Danny said skeptically.

Otis said nothing but eased the pedal to the floor. Soon the Burma Shave signs that spelled out humorous riddles clicked past too rapidly to be read. They overtook a farmer putt-putting along in an ancient Chevy pickup and Otis was forced to pass
him even though he couldn’t see around the curve. An oncoming car was suddenly on top of them and Otis slipped in front of the pickup just in time. Howard looked back: Danny’s smile was radiant, his hands relaxed, tan, sinewy on the back of the seat.

They ate burgers at a greasy spoon and in the afternoon Howard took the back seat because he said he wanted to stretch out and catch some z’s. In fact he was exhausted from feeling Danny’s energy cooking just behind him. Howard also wanted to hear how regular guys talked to each other when alone. When Howard was with Otis he laughed at all of Otis’s jokes, never interrupted, never supplied a word, nodded vigorously at every tentative assertion and elaborated with lavish resources of fantasy Otis’s vaguest speculations.

With Danny Otis was a lot more competitive. After all, Otis had lived in Evanston all his life and was the head of the Crowd, whereas Danny’s mother had moved from Oak Park just two years ago. Otis had a position to protect—although that was probably just Howard’s twisted way of looking at things. In fact Otis always said he didn’t give a flying fuck about the Crowd and knew that high school wasn’t exactly the alpha and omega of human achievement for Christ’s sake.

But what frustrated Danny (or so Otis said) was that he was a champion swimmer and a grind who got straight A’s in math and science and he’d burrowed into an exclusive relationship with a serious white-lipped girl he bullied and planned to marry—and yet no one much liked him, whereas Otis, this big fuck-up, awakened smiles wherever he went.

And yet there was nothing competitive about their conversation now as Howard, pretending to be asleep, eavesdropped. Danny and Otis let long comfortable silences fill up the spaces between them. Danny whistled softly along with the radio, not with puckered lips as girls do but rather in that tough-guy way of folding the lower lip back over the bottom teeth in order to
create a sort of harmonica. They joked about something they saw along the highway (“Oh, terrific, that will come in real handy”) but Howard couldn’t figure out what it was. Howard felt that if he slept with his head on Danny’s lap it would smell like piss and semen and wouldn’t be very comfortable since Danny was so lean and muscly. He wasn’t at all jealous of Danny and Otis’s comfortable, palsy way of sitting together because he knew it didn’t mean much to either of them. They’d never remember this calm, not even an hour later, because it was unattached to their self-discovery or ambitions. Howard had learned, exactly as though he were the big-sister not-too-swift-looking kind of girl, how to listen to guys and encourage them in their dopey, tentative way of talking about their future and inner feelings.

They crossed Wisconsin. Sometimes it seemed the only stores were beer takeouts and roadside bars, built like log cabins and dark and dank inside even by day. They ate thick beer pretzels while downing a couple of “brewskies,” as girls called beer. No one asked to see their ID. They chewed on spicy thin bar sausages, each individually wrapped in cellophane.

“Hey, Otis, ’bout the size of your wiener, huh?” Danny said in a loud voice, laughing, holding up the skinny sausage. When Otis put his hands in his pockets, whistled and raised his eyes to the ceiling in mock exasperation, or as though to say, “Hey, who is this guy, could you get him off my back?” Danny laughed even louder. Howard had never seen Otis’s dick except as a soft shape in the pocket of his underpants; he wondered if he’d see it on the canoe trip. Would they all go skinny-dipping? Howard guessed Otis’s dick was small and Danny’s was big.

Back in the car Danny took the wheel and Otis slid in the back seat. Howard studied Otis as he strummed his guitar. He had a small nose, straight dirty blond hair and a cowlick, perfect skin and eyelashes so pale they were visible only in this cross light. When he laughed—or concentrated, as he was
doing now—a single line creased his forehead. His eyes were the blue of old lapis overexposed to the sun and his teeth slightly yellowed by some sulfa drug he’d been given as a kid. His body was nearly hairless except for a pale brown line just below his kneecap on the inner, upper side of his calf, as though the artist had wet his thumb and smudged the line there. His most distinctive mannerism was his laugh. He’d hold a sort of frozen smile while his eyes stayed enigmatic, and after a strange delay a tenor laugh, stabbing away at the same note, would come rattling out of him in volleys, a bit like the accelerating rhythm of a sewing machine before it stops to start a new seam.

Now he was wrapped around his guitar, one hand fretting, the other strumming, the top of his head with the shiny hair and the cowlick all that was visible, as though he were looking into the hole under the strings, as though the guitar were a woman’s body he was looking into.

That night they ate in a diner and then got drunk at a roadside bar. Otis and Danny talked to the other men at the bar. Their voices became loud and their faces red. Howard didn’t want to say anything or even move because he was afraid these men would catch on that he was a sissy and make Otis and Danny feel ashamed that they were traveling with him. Howard longed to be alone with his two friends. Only when they were all alone did Howard’s brand of …
charm
take effect.

They slept in the country in their sleeping bags beside the car just off a dirt road. In the dark they talked about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Otis was willing to consider the option of living under Soviet rule. “I’d rather be Red than dead,” he said. The next morning they didn’t shave or bathe and they agreed they’d all grow their beards during the canoe trip.

They drove up through Minnesota and late in the afternoon reached the edge of the Quetico lake country, an immense park
of lakes and waterways and islands that extended across the border up into Canada. Otis had done all this before and at the outfitter’s, a good-sized store right next to the lake, he rented a canoe, a motor and a can of gas, a tent, backpacks, fishing rods, supplies. They paddled for about an hour, then felt lazy and motored deeper into the stillness.

“What’s that weird cry?” Danny asked. He was at the back of the boat, next to the outboard.

“A loon,” Otis said. “A bird. You’ll see them—and hear them—everywhere. They have black heads and a silky black band around their black-and-white-striped necks.”

The sound was heartbreaking, a nearly human cry—and utterly inhuman. Howard remembered his hours alone playing in the woods when he was a boy; back then he was what Mr. Redfern, the human sciences master, had called an “animist.” He saw a spirit in every tree, worshiped a local deity at every clearing, ascribed human associations even to flowers—the four pure white petals of the bunchberry flower, worthy of a diplomatic sash, each petal mitered like a bishop’s hat, the four composing a cross of Malta around the stigmas and anthers clustered at the center like tiny diamonds mounted at varying heights on slender stems.

But now the natural world no longer signified, or did so only intermittently. As they drifted in their canoe into a new lake, for a moment he could see the black trunk of a fire-scarred red pine as a demon’s beard carbonized with heat, but a moment later he lapsed into seeing it as an unconscious plant decomposing faster than usual.

As the evening gradually intensified, Howard didn’t know if he was sad because the pines and their reflections were black as a backbone in an X ray and the big, rounded cloud above and its rippled double below as pink and luminous as a pair of lungs, one damaged—or was he sad because they weren’t human at all, just light, atmosphere and an accelerating loss of
heat? Nature was either a cathedral, the walls of quartz and feldspar, the columns soaring jack pines and paper birches, the altar one of those massive stones shoved by a glacier into an improbable place and called an “erratic” by geologists—or it was empty, desolate, even nauseatingly empty.

They put up their tent at the top of a hill softly carpeted with moss and lichens, so that if it rained the water wouldn’t collect under their sleeping bags. Howard liked the musty or was it moldy smell of the canvas—a smell of armies and attics, of World War II uniforms stored away under the eaves. Whereas Otis and Howard were lethargic and had to sit and think a moment before moving, Danny was always crackling with energy; you could almost hear the electricity singing in his body. Danny gathered wood and had soon constructed a tidy little fire. They drank the cold, clear water directly from the lake; it was so cold it hurt Howard’s teeth. Once the sun went down a chill rose up out of the very earth. They gathered close to the fire and ate powdered mashed potatoes and the walleye Danny had caught and cleaned. After dinner they went one after another into the woods to piss; Danny called back that he was being embraced by a horny she-bear.

The lake lapped at itself like a sleeping dog. When Howard looked up at the stars—he’d never seen so many—he thought of them as the jewels powering God’s Bulova watch. There was a sudden quaking of light at the horizon that Otis called “the Northern Lights.” An owl, far away, hooted. Sometimes the water would be slapped by fin or paw—Howard preferred not to guess which. The fire died down and Danny banked it, hoping the coals would last till morning.

They slipped out of their blue jeans in the dark and into their sleeping bags. Howard was in the middle, between Otis and Danny, who lay closest to the tent flaps. A single mosquito did diploma-level flying lessons around Howard’s ear,

“Hey, guys,” Otis said, “it looks like I’m going to let a fart.”

“Oh, gross,” Danny said. Howard groaned too. He sniffed for the odor but caught no whiff of it.

“You know, guys,” Otis went on, “did you notice there weren’t any blueberries this year?”

“So what?” Danny asked. “Anyway, I’ve seen plenty.”

Howard liked the vibrant hum of their voices, Otis’s higher in his left ear and Danny’s lower and hoarser in his right.

“There are no berries. That means the bears are hungry and aren’t above eating a white boy or two, especially those closest to the tent flaps.”

“Shi-i-it …” Danny exhaled, “you sure like to make your pals feel good. Frankly I think a bear would prefer a nice soft North Shore tennis player to a stringy old swimmer like me.”

The silence condensed like fog on the darkening glass of Howard’s mind. He turned on his right side toward Danny and imagined he glimpsed a glint of his gold tooth—was he smiling?

The next morning a heavy mist dematerialized the other side of the lake, fudging the line between water and the horizon of black spruce. That farther shoreline was already invaded by light—the lower, paler band of fog, the little, violet line of trees painting the upper, shell-pink sky with thousands of dark fingers. The foreground was still dark blue, almost black, the pine sapling near them silhouetted against the illuminated mist.

After a breakfast of pancakes, the batter made from lake water added to a mix, they packed up while smoking a Parliament. Danny decided not to smoke anymore—he needed his lung power for swimming—and he razzed them for smoking women’s Kotex cigarettes. That remark, added to last night’s gibe about a soft tennis player’s body, must have rubbed Otis the wrong way because soon he was griping about Danny’s littering.

“Look, guys,” he said, “I don’t want to sound like a fucking Eagle Scout, but you’ve gotta bury your litter at least a foot
deep and rake your fire out and drown it with some lake water.” Little smile. “Remember Smokey the Bear.”

“Yeah, right,” Danny said. “And what about your fuckin’ Parliament filters? Those fuckin’ babies are indestructible, they’re eternal.”

“Can it,” Otis said. Danny did shut up, but Howard doubted he’d really canned it.

The sun rose and the day turned hot. They took off their rain slickers, their sweaters, finally their shirts. Otis taught Howard how to paddle, to reach far forward, to dig a deep stroke and push through with it, to turn the blade sideways at the end and lift it just high enough not to skim the surface of the water. Howard kept slapping the water on the upstroke or plowing off to one side instead of straight down and each time Otis shook his head, fatherly and defeated.

“Let up on him, for crying out loud,” Danny said, irritated. “He’s doing fine.” Howard felt like a kid fought over by his parents.

In the midday heat they breasted their way through a shallow lake of reeds. They could touch bottom with their paddles. The reeds dragged against the bottom of the boat and in their wake sprang back in place.

Howard paddled in the bow and Danny in the stern, guiding them, while Otis hunched over his guitar. He was composing a song, words and music, about their trip: “We’re pulling up the river, boys, / just as far as we can go….” He’d piece together two or three notes with the appropriate chords, then play them quickly together to get the effect, strangely syncopated by the reeds dragging across the hull, brushes on drums and cymbals, and by the tragic laugh of a loon, the one drunk in the audience.

At last they were out of the marshlands and into open water again. The lake hung before them tremblingly like tears that won’t fall. Otis pointed out moose tracks—two deep toe marks
separated by a delicate ridge—trotting across the sandy beach beside them.

A sudden shot rang out above their heads. Otis and Howard looked back to see Danny, grinning broadly, with a smoking pistol in his hand. Otis lunged toward him, they wrestled, the boat rocked wildly and Howard, still in front, couldn’t see past Otis’s back to figure out what he was doing. “What the
hell
, what the
hell,”
Otis was shouting.

“Let-go-fucker, you hear me, I said, let-go-
now
,” Danny was saying in a steady, hate-filled voice.

Finally Otis gave up. He returned to his seat and took up his guitar. Danny was still smiling, though his eyes looked small and startled. He lowered the motor in place and started it on the second try. The canoe headed out until they were alongside the dead loon, floating in the water, a crimson-and-black hole blasted out of its body.