threatening than my own imagination that day in the basement. And here I’d let him slip away, back to the jungle to die, without even a real good-bye.
I was still thinking along those lines when I heard the car pull away from the house. Some little voice was whispering, Get up! Go the window and watch them drive away, follow the car with your eyes as far as you can or they might never come back! If something happens it will be your fault for not being with them!
Stupid, right? But my hands had to clench the sheet under me so that I couldn’t dash to the window and watch the car disappear. Then there was silence, and this intense feeling of being completely alone.
Damn Chris, anyway! Why did he have to burden me with his fucking secrets? I’d had to listen to Dad for days, talking about how great Chris had looked, what a good soldier he was, with Mom adding what a handsome man he was growing into. Then Dad would go on about how bravely he was facing everything “over there.” I’m surprised nobody noticed the blood dripping out of the corners of my mouth! I mean, I was biting my tongue so much, and so hard, to keep from telling them how wrong they had it. How they didn’t know him at all. How I was the only one who really did.
So I lay there for a long time, feeling guilty about the way I’d treated Chris and wishing I’d gone with my folks to church, and feeling like the weight of what Chris had laid on me was what made me unable to get up and go with them.
If I can’t go to church and pray for your safety, big brother, it’s your own goddamn fault.
Like that made any sense. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and held my breath to keep tears in. I missed him so much! So fucking much! And now I felt like I’d never have him back. Even if he was wrong about dying over there, if he couldn’t go back to being normal I felt like he’d never be my brother again.
I tried to focus on what being gay was all about, tried to figure it out so maybe I could help undo it, but trying to think about that was like grabbing a fish underwater. I could sort of see it, and I could get close but not close enough. And sometimes I could feel it, but that was all.
What did come to mind clearly was the time Marty Kaufman and I had decided to teach this nerd a lesson. I couldn’t figure out at first why my mind went there, but I guess it was an indirect way to think about something that was too uncomfortable for me to look at directly. Kind of like if you want to see a star in the sky, you have to look off to the side a little.
I was fourteen. Marty—who’d been held back in sixth grade—was fifteen, and the nerd, Anthony (a.k.a. Don’t-Call-Me-Tony), was only thirteen because he’d been accelerated a grade at some point. This one year Anthony had seriously over-stepped his usual level of priggishness. He’d always been kind of a teacher’s pet, always won prizes for things like spelling bees and giving the best speech, always got high marks for everything—especially math. And always lording it over us dummies. Or so it seemed like, anyway. Looking back, I think maybe he wasn’t. I think maybe he was just trying to make us think he wasn’t afraid of us, ’cause that would have been the worst.
Anyway, at the start of that school year, it didn’t take him very long to let us all know that he’d been to this summer camp for math geniuses, and it became obvious real fast that this experience had given him some superinflated idea of his own worth as a human being. Like because he was so smart, he was more important than the rest of us.
I suppose that if there were two kids in class who would take this the hardest, it was gonna be me, because of always feeling like the bad kid in the family, and Marty, who really was the bad kid in the family. He’d already run away like, three times? He’d been caught stealing records, he’d broken into the high school once with Kevin Dodge and they’d smashed as much glass in the chem lab as they could find, stuff like that.
Since my last name’s Landon and Marty’s is Kaufman, we’ve usually sat either next to each other or me behind him since sixth grade on. He was the sort of kid who’s always thinking of new ways to get into trouble. You could usually tell when he was hatching something; his head would sink a little into his shoulders, and his light brown eyes would look at you sort of sideways from under the nothing-brown eyebrows. He wasn’t too much of a threat in sixth grade—at least, not to me—but with each year he got taller and a little more threatening. And it always seemed as though his hair was just a little longer than it should be, like proving he was defying something. I sort of had to make friends with him, or it would have been hell. But I’d managed to avoid getting sucked into the worst of his schemes. Until Anthony came back from math camp.
And it was just too good. Too tempting. It was Marty’s idea. I don’t say that to get out of any of the blame, just to be clear that it was his genius. And it was genius.
You know that expression that goes, “It seemed like a good idea at the time”? Well, we literally kidnapped Anthony one Monday afternoon, on the way home from school. Marty had skipped out on his last class so he could go home and sneak off with his mom’s car. She’d gone with a friend to a bridge party, or some such thing, and the car was there for the taking. He had a learner’s permit, not the full license, but Marty wasn’t one to let a thing like that stop him.
He picked me up at school, and we headed off in the direction Anthony would walk to get home. He was walking alone, par for the course; who’d walk with him? Marty slowed the car way down to roll alongside, and I rolled my window down to get his attention.
“Hey, Tony, wanna lift?”
He glared at me and then stared straight ahead. It took a few seconds, but finally he couldn’t stand it, and he said, “Don’t call me Tony.”
“Aw, don’t be so stiff. C’mon, let us give you a ride home. Whad’ya say?”
He looked hard at me, and I think we almost had him, but then he looked at who was driving. “No, thanks. I’m fine.” He picked up his pace and moved ahead of us.
I fished a rope from the floor by my feet. One end was tied into a slipknot. And then I tried once more. “Anthony? You sure?”
He didn’t even look at me this time. “I’m sure.”
I could tell he was getting a little nervous. I rolled up my window and looked at Marty like it was now or never. He nodded and pulled a little ahead of Anthony, I jumped out and threw the rope over the kid, and then I shoved him into the back. He started screaming right away, and I almost didn’t want to take the time to pick up his books, but I did. I threw them into the back, and one of them hit the side of his head. I looked to make sure he was okay, and he was staring at me, stark-raving terror on his face. At least it had shut him up.
Marty drove out to a dirt road and followed it to the edge of this field where there was a tree he was headed for. We tied each of Anthony’s hands separately around the tree, and did the same with his feet. It made the rest of his body stand out, vulnerable, helpless.
Anthony was crying by this time. At first he tried pleading with us. “Please, don’t. Don’t do this. I never did anything to you. Please.” Every so often he’d snuffle or sob. Marty and I just ignored him, and finally he gave up begging.
When we had him sufficiently trussed, we sat on the ground. Trying to look casual, I reached for a grass stalk and sucked on it. Marty looked at me and laughed. “Fuck that shit!” he said, and pulled a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket; didn’t offer me one, which was good ’cause I wouldn’t have known what to do. He lit up, took a few puffs, then got up and went close enough to blow a lungful of smoke into Anthony’s face. I was getting a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to control Marty if he decided he wanted to do something really awful, so I tried to get him back to our program. I picked up my copy of our math book for that year.
“Hey Marty, you wanna start?”
Marty stood where he was, his nose inches from Anthony’s wet face, for another few seconds. “Yeah. Sure. Gimme the book.”
He plopped down on the ground to my left and flipped the book open at random. “Okay, Tony, now here’s the rules. I’m gonna ask you a question, and you answer. Only