Skinned Alive (3 page)

That night Danny plucked and cleaned his bird and skewered it with a stick and roasted it over the fire. No one said anything. Otis refused to touch it and rustled up some bacon and powdered scrambled eggs for Howard and himself. When Danny poked the plate of cooked and cut-up loon toward them, Howard refused it with a smile, rolling his eyes to indicate Otis, who’d turned his back on them. Danny’s jaw muscle kept working with exasperation. He tried to eat it but couldn’t. Was it too tough? It stunk of oil, a fishy oil. All of a sudden he jumped up and went off into the woods and a few minutes later they could hear gunshots ringing out. Howard figured he was shooting at squirrels in the last dying light.

“If I’d known he was carrying a gun, I’d never have let him come along,” Otis said. Suddenly he hit the ground with his fist. “Damn! My instincts told me not to let that yo-yo loose on the wilderness. You know shooting a loon is strictly against the law. For the Canadians shooting a loon would be like shooting a bald eagle in America.”

Otis and Howard smoked their Parliaments. Howard liked the dry, strangulated taste of the heavily filtered smoke, as though this neat white cylinder and its mild emissions were the necessary link to civilization. But they were careful to push the butts with their long filters deep into the sand beside the untroubled lake in which reflected stars were taking shape like obsessions in a gloomy mind. Otis played the two lines of the song he’d pieced together today, then sang through a blues song about a New Orleans bordello, “The House of the Rising Sun.” Danny had come back but was sitting by himself on a log, cleaning his pistol. Finally Otis got up and walked over to Danny and held out his hand, which Danny shook. “Sorry if I got too bossy today,” Otis said. “You took me by surprise with shots suddenly whizzing over my head.” Danny didn’t say anything but smiled.

“Shall we turn in and catch some z’s?” Howard asked, hoping to break the tension. Otis’s strange little mirthless laugh came rattling out of him on its single tinny note, the sound of coins falling into a piggy bank.

They talked about their beards. Danny’s beard was coming in thick in proper gold, whereas Otis’s was just a smudge of mustache and goatee and then a beardless jaw and a wisp of fuzz along his neck. Howard couldn’t see his own beard but Danny, standing just a foot away from him now and studying his face by the dying firelight, said he thought it was coming in brown and ginger with an empty whorl just to the left of his mouth.

Danny said his underpants were getting grungy. He turned his back to them and slipped out of them, then put his jeans back on over his bare ass and washed out his Jockey shorts in the lake with a bar of soap and hung them to dry on a bough of balsam fir. Howard caught a glimpse of Danny’s very narrow hips, as brown as his torso, and he realized he must have lain in the sun entirely naked, but where? “Those underpants are
going to attract some horny she-bear,” Howard said, tactfully alluding to a creature Danny had already invented.

“Do you really think there are bears in these woods?” Danny asked.

“Sho’ nuff—black bear. There is plenty black bear,” Otis said with a hint of hillbilly twang. Suddenly for no reason they all three started rocking with laughter.

When they went into the tent, took off their jeans and slipped into the sleeping bags, Howard was almost unbearably excited by the idea Danny was naked from the waist down inside his sack. Otis tried to scare them by saying he heard a hungry bear crashing through the underbrush but soon he was asleep, his breath rasping softly like an emery board drawn back and forth across a fingernail, Howard turned on his right side toward Danny at the same moment Danny turned toward him and they were looking wide-eyed at each other in the dark.

“Do you hear that dog barking?” Howard whispered. “Where did he come from?”

Danny replied in his low rasping voice, “Otis said a ranger lives on this lake in his cabin—it must be his dog.”

“Oh,” Howard said. He wanted to reach out and touch Danny’s arm, which he’d folded back behind his head. It was just a few inches away. A few hairs showed in his armpit which Howard remembered was intricate with rigged and anchored muscles. Howard’s erection was so hard it hurt.

“Good night,” Danny said and smiled. Soon he turned away and dropped into serene sleep. Slowly, slowly, Howard eased his underpants down around his thighs and then masturbated as quickly and silently as possible. When he came he smoothed the semen over his stomach. He almost resented Otis’s presence.

The next day they lay in bed yawning and talking. The tent was translucent and Howard said he felt they were living inside a lime wedge. Otis sang, “I’m in the nude for love.”

They paddled down a river through whitewater and then arrived at a portage where they had to empty their supplies and carry the inverted canoe on their heads like a hat. They walked through the woods. Both Otis and Danny were quietly solicitous of Howard, as though afraid of tiring him. They followed the path. The soil to each side was damp and covered with dark green mosses, light green ferns and young maple trees the height of a man crowding around the soaring corrugated trunks of jack pines often spotted with pale lichens. The path itself was thick with brown pine needles and scattered pinecones; the needles covered but didn’t conceal the long roots of trees and the boulders that had been fractured by frost in winter, the cracks invaded by orange lichen.

Howard stumbled on a rock and Danny, who was just behind him, patted him lightly on the butt as football players do to reassure one another, as though to say, “I’m here, we’re in this together.” Howard could feel the touch of Danny’s hand for a long time afterward on his ass and he became conscious of his own hips moving inside his jeans.

That night they were worn out from their trek and said little. Danny took off all his clothes and swam with perfect form far out into the lake. Otis caught Howard looking at Danny’s retreating head, arcing arms and rapidly churning feet and seemed to frown, but Howard wasn’t sure why or even if Otis was really frowning. Was it because Danny was taking a risk by swimming out so far? Or was Otis pissed off because Howard was looking at Danny so hungrily? Otis kept hoping Howard would outgrow this twisted sex thing and settle down with some nice girl; that was probably one reason Otis had invited him along, to toughen him up, give him some confidence or at least a taste for the company of normal guys doing normal-guy things close to nature. And yet Howard felt that if the great outdoors was for normal men then he didn’t
belong in it; for him it was the church of an alien cult and he tiptoed through it warily.

Howard forced himself to open the map and study it so that he wouldn’t be looking at Danny when he came naked out of the water. “I really love all these names,” Howard said. “Little Saganaga Lake. Granite River. Gunflint Lake.” But here was Danny naked and trembling, hugging himself beside the camp-fire. No way to tell if his penis was big, it had shrunk with the cold.

“Cold as a witch’s tit,” he said, laughing, his teeth chattering.

If Otis hadn’t been there Howard would have rubbed Danny down to warm him up, get the blood flowing. Danny’s body was hard and brown and virile even if he looked like a boy. His wet hair hung in bangs on his forehead and his long, muscled arms were hugging his lean torso. Without clothes he looked smaller than when he was dressed. It was hard to reconcile this small body with the force it unleashed when he swam. His stomach was hard and forked muscles ran up it.

Later it began to rain and water seeped up through the comfortable moss bed they’d staked the tent out over. They were all wet and miserable, especially Danny who was downhill, so Howard and Danny squeezed uphill closer to Otis. Howard kept his back to Otis. He was looking at Danny’s tan neck and could smell the clean smell of lake water on Danny’s skin.

The next morning it was too wet to get a fire going so they just drank some powdered milk and ate the last of their sliced white bread, which was getting moldy. In the boat they huddled under their rain slickers, ran the motor and didn’t even bother to paddle. They had only half a gallon of gasoline left. When it ran out the sky turned blue-black and a cold wind drilled them with fine, stinging rain. The lake turned rough and they had a hard time reaching the shore, where they had to pitch
tent in the rain. They couldn’t find a dry campsite but at least this time they avoided moss and lichen and staked out their pegs and cords on high ground. A gray jay kept fussing at them from a high branch. A saprophyte, repulsively colorless Indian pipe, had sprung out of a rotting stump; there was something frightful about it, like fetuses in jars of formaldehyde, their bodies similarly silvery and translucent.

Danny went into the woods and started shooting. Otis laughed his laugh and said, “That crazy motherfucker. I really want to apologize to you, Howard. I just didn’t know.” Howard shrugged benevolently, ashamed that he was so attracted to Danny. “We could get into real trouble with the law,” Otis continued. “We could be dragged out of these woods in chains. Not to mention that crazy guy could gun us down.”

“What’s up with him, anyway?” Howard asked. “Do you think he’s jealous of our friendship?” Howard wanted Otis to recognize that their friendship was sufficiently admirable as to be enviable.

“Could be,” Otis said. “Or maybe the wilderness has made him go buggy. It can have that effect.” He strummed his guitar, then played a loud dissonant chord and threw the instrument aside. “I keep feeling he hates my guts. But why? He didn’t before. Do you think I did anything to provoke him?”

Howard was always ready to take the blame for irritating other people, especially men, but he couldn’t imagine what Otis had said or done.

“Maybe he doesn’t like it that you’re the self-appointed leader,” Howard ventured. “Maybe you should play the goof-off and force him to make all the decisions.”

“Good idea.”

They began to talk as they had always talked when alone. It was a bit like floating in a pool on a rubber raft and pushing off again and again when the raft softly bumped against one side or the other. They were both dreamers, idlers, and Danny’s
harrowing, scarcely hidden violence had drained all the water out of the pool.

Danny came back with two small red squirrels he’d shot. Cleaning them was grizzly and all that was left were two tiny, bug-eyed skinless monsters. Danny splayed them on sticks but even he couldn’t eat them after they were cooked and Otis shared with him some of the delicious lake trout he’d fished that evening off the campsite. They talked about steaks and how they’d eat big T-bones as soon as they were back to civilization.

In Evanston Danny was a hardworking, well-spoken student preparing himself for an education in engineering. When he wasn’t studying at his girlfriend’s house he was swimming laps or running errands for his mother, who was the school nurse and worked long hours. He went to the Lutheran church every Sunday with his mother and girlfriend and he was active at the YMCA in the Eisenhower Club (Otis belonged to the more prestigious Jefferson Club). Every second of his time was accounted for and all his demonic energy was fully harnessed. Howard thought he probably wasn’t fucking his girlfriend but that he’d convinced her to give him a handjob on Saturday nights.

Out here, though, Danny wouldn’t talk about any of their favorite subjects—life after death, the existence of God, the terrors of totalitarianism, the pros and cons of premarital sex. The language had become coarser, as though they were all in boot camp. Was he trying to intimidate them by proving how tough he was under the model-citizen veneer he’d assumed in Evanston? Or was he spooked by the woods and finding it necessary to act tough in order to survive? Or was he just free at last to unleash the animal that had been crouching inside him all the while?

The next morning they laughed and said they were living inside a lime wedge and Otis warbled again, “I’m in the nude
for love.” He had added more verses to his song, which included the place-names of the lakes and rivers they had visited; he sang it out now in his bawling, unsupported voice, a comic voice different from the hillbilly crooning voice he used for his ballads and blues.

Although the sun came out, a steady breeze made it tiring to paddle. Light sparkled on the faceted waves and more than once Howard discovered he’d been hypnotized for a minute or was it ten by the dazzle and the constant rhythm of their paddles. The aspens danced in the wind, bending and flipping their small leaves from the silver to the pale green side, whereas the evergreens stood as tall and motionless as crack soldiers. They passed through a narrows from one lake to the next and Howard saw the trunk of a paper birch in full sunlight, slowly unscrolling its bark, watermarked by small horizontal dashes in the filigrain. Each layer cast an undulating shadow on the bark beneath; these superimposed layers were the color and form of wind-sculpted dunes in the desert. Danny said nothing but “shit” and “horseshit,” called every object a “motherfucker” and attributed to every noun the adjective “fuckin’.”

That night the wind died down and the weather turned airless, hot, sweaty hot. They tied the tent flaps back, then finally Howard and Danny moved their sleeping bags outside. Otis thought the tent offered more protection against the mosquitoes. He was right. The mosquitoes were tireless in their attentions to Howard’s face, neck, arms.

Danny was entirely naked and at first retracted even his head into the sleeping bag to stop being bitten but then he was driven out by the heat. He ended up lying naked and sweating on top of his sleeping bag slapping at the bugs. He’d lost weight on the trip and his eyes looked hollow and sunken in the moonlight. His beard was coming in thick and was made up of brass wires as straight as pine needles or pins. Howard, too, was lying on top of his sleeping bag but in his underpants.
Danny turned toward Howard and smiled, then lay on his back with his legs apart and one arm thrown back over his eyes.

Howard suddenly understood everything. Danny hated Otis and was jealous of everything he possessed, including Howard’s devotion. Danny had figured out that Howard was completely under his spell. He was competing with Otis for Howard’s love. Not because Danny wanted it—no, he wanted perversely to show that his power over Howard was stronger even than Otis’s. But if Howard ever responded—if Howard ever reached out and touched this body—then Danny would crow triumphantly, reject Howard brutally and demand of Otis if he and Howard were lovers and pansy playmates, Danny would tell everyone at Evanston High that they were fruits and Otis would be forced to give up Howard’s friendship.