Message of Love Page 6

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  I sighed. Urine dribbled down my leg, until I clenched, stopping the flow. I’d made my point. “Now we’re even. We’re both embarrassed.”

  Everett’s scowl brightened to a sardonic smirk. “I think you liked doing that, you perv.”

  I shrugged, bent over to mop up with the beach towel. “It did kinda tickle.”

  Crisis averted, as he cleaned up in the bathroom, I tugged the mattress to the floor, then switched it with the one above, reminding myself to visit the kitchen and find some Lysol for the mattress.

  Whatever trepidation I had about being a camp counselor dissipated by the end of the first few days.

  Whether they stuttered or spasmed or didn’t move much at all, each of the kids had their spark, even the sullen ones who feared being left without their parents for a week or two. Some of the kids stayed for shorter lengths of time than others, depending on their parents’ schedules and budgets.

  Everett’s immediate popularity with the kids didn’t surprise me. They had someone like them to inspire them, particularly with his more physically adept maneuvers.

  Certainly I was liked, or I hoped I was, but Everett and the kids seemed to share a common language and understanding. I found myself crouching a lot, since they were smaller.

  But it only took one game of balloon toss, a bit safer than any heavy ball, to define it all for me. One of the girls just bluntly said, as we paired off into two groups, “I wanna be on Everett’s team!” I let her roll away from me, blushing with an embarrassment that only his silent smile could soften.

  My favorite had to be Kenny, who steered his motorized chair with his nub of an arm, and whose favorite phrase was, “This is amazing!” Since we both wore black-framed glasses, he took to me as a sort of role model, scooting himself wherever I went, until another counselor would corral him back.

  After our group dinners, some nights Everett would lead the kids in sing-alongs. The kids weren’t the only ones who smiled at the sound of his voice.

  On quiet afternoons, the crafts cabin would be nearly still except for the scratching sounds of crayons on paper. Over the next few weeks, the blank walls of our cabin became decorated with pinned-up drawings by the kids. I had never thought of myself as a teacher or even artistic, but given the context of nature, something opened up in me as the kids opened up as well.

  In the middle of one of the few rainy afternoons, the activities shifted as the other counselors helped me bring out paper, crayons and magic markers. I decided to offer a primer on different kinds of trees.

  Kenny declared that he would make autumn leaves, because they were “amazing!” even though it was summer, which led to another kid asking why leaves turned color and if they died. I fumbled through a kid version of carotene, anthocyanin, and the photosynthetic pigment depletion, until Alice saved me with a simpler comparison to animals shedding fur.

  As I was helping Jennifer, one of the cerebral palsy kids, pick out colors for her leaf drawing, she bluntly asked me, “Are you disabled, too?”

  I looked at her curious wide eyes and smiled. “You know my buddy Everett?”

  “Yeah. Ebredd sings priddy.”

  “Yes, he does. And my disability is, if I’m too far away from him, I can’t breathe.”

  She gasped. “Really?”

  “No, not really. It just feels like that sometimes.”

  “Are you brothers?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You don’t look like brothers.”

  I leaned close to her, “Can you keep a secret?” and whispered, “That’s because we’re in disguise. We’re twin unicorns from a distant galaxy.”

  Her volley of giggles took on an almost goose-like honk. A few of the other kids just caught on, laughing for no reason, or at her laughter, until Alice suggested “we should all calm down,” followed by a stern glare toward me.

  “Dodecatheon.”

  “Stars; shooting stars,” I answered.

  Everett and I lay on a blanket in a small clearing at the edge of the campground. It wasn’t late, after nine. We had missed the nightly ghostlike firefly dance over the fields. But the kids were in bed, the other teachers and supervisors relaxing in their own cabins. We’d found a path that he could wheel over, settled down with a few beers I’d hidden in a cooler after a shopping trip in town. They were warm, but we didn’t complain. The air was also warm, a thick verdant texture we could almost taste.

  “The stars are pretty,” Everett said.

  “The stars are always pretty.”

  “Even the dead ones.”

  “That’s a morbid perspective,” I said.

  I rolled over on my side, gazing at Everett’s face in the night as he looked upward, then returned my gaze.

  “It’s a sad fact,” he said, softly. “Those stars, sending out that light, millions of years after their passing. You know one of the boys isn’t well. Kenny?”

  “He’s ‘amazing’!”

  Everett tried a grin, but failed. “He’s got some congenital thing; his bones won’t grow right. And his kidney’s fucked up. People with disabilities, we ... sometimes we don’t last as long, Reid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s… It happens. It’s a health thing. We get sick. Our bodies don’t process things right. Urinary tract infections, respiratory problems…”

  “Stop it.” I bolted up to sitting.

  “I just want you to know, to face facts.” I felt his hand on my lower back, touching me where his own injury had occurred.

  “I want you to know what you’re in for.”

  “I know. But you don’t have be so…”

  “What?”

  “It’s like… you’re always trying to give me a way out. You’re so sweet, and you challenge me, and you made all these changes to be with me, and you’re patient with me about everything. But then you just point a little finger like, ‘By the way, here’s the emergency exit.’”

  “Hey, you were the one who fell for my mom’s plan before I even heard about it. That was not my–”

  “I know, I know. It’s all my fault you’re transferring.”

  “I just want you to–”

  “Don’t.”

  We stopped, sat without moving. The sounds of the woods were much more reasonable.

  “You’ve made my life so different,” I said, after a while. “All these trees. A few years ago, I’d be just seeing them, not the people.”

  “The studious botanist.”

  “These kids. They just…” I fought back a surge of tears. “You know Madeline, the little blonde?”

  “She’s great. So sweet.”

  “I was sitting with her at lunch today. I think you were out on the playground somewhere. She just started humming this little song, so off-key, but so perfect. And it sounded so familiar. And then I realized it was that song you taught them last week, one of the tunes you sang to me from the radio in the van. I just…”

  I shuddered. Everett hoisted himself up. “Hey, hey…” He rubbed my back, leaned in, grabbed his legs, shifting them a bit.

  “I can’t be without you, without this, seeing people, their sweetness. It makes me feel… my stomach and my heart just… It’s like I see their innocence, and I worry and fear for them, and you, and at the same time I know you’ll be okay, but it’s like, I get all … squidly or something.”

  “Squidly. I like that; a quivering jellyfish of emotion.”

  I turned, wrapped myself around him, holding him tight. With my face crooked into his shoulder, I smelled the light salty odor of his sweat. His kisses started on my neck, and as I turned toward him, the night light gave his face an eerie glow, the quiet only disturbed by my snorting back a burst of emotion.

  “Pick me up.”

  “Do you wanna leave?” I asked.

  “No, pick me up to standing.”

  “What? How?”

  “Just… like piggybacking, but in front.�
�

  I crouched, held him as he wrapped his arms tightly around my neck. Then I rose and felt his legs drop down against mine. I swayed, nearly faltering to avoid spilling the beer cans. I felt how heavy and light he was at the same time.

  Facing me, he said, “Just dance with me.”

  He hummed a tune into my ear as I stepped cautiously, side to side, off the blanket and out into the open field. Then he softly sang, another one of his old-time tunes.

  “You’re all the places that leave me breathless, and no wonder, you’re all the world to me.”

  He felt so strong, holding on to me. I pressed my face against him, wiping tears into his hair, then pulled back to see him grinning wide.

  “See? One less thing I can’t do, thanks to you.”

  “Sweet.” I swayed with a bit more daring, swirling about.

  “Would you do this with me at a wedding?” he asked.

  “Whose wedding?”

  “Let’s say my dad remarries.”

  “If it’s okay with you,” I said.

  “It’s okay with me,” he answered.

  “Stick around, and I’ll dance with you anywhere.”

  “It’s a deal, Squidly.”

  Crickets, starlight, trees sleeping in the night; it was as if that thick summer night air held us up.

  Chapter 8

  August 1980

  The van, parked in the driveway of my parents’ house, was once again in need of repair. But Everett and I weren’t concerned about it, and instead pondered Kevin Muir as he fiddled under the hood, his tight cut-off denim shorts pressing against his bent-over ass.

  The van had conked out a few times, and Kevin provided a little in-home fix, shrugging off our muttered catcalls of “lemon” as I sat in a lawn chair with Everett beside me, basking in the sun like fans at a softball game. As Kevin bent over the engine, Everett changed the fruity chant to “melons.”

  I chortled. The afternoon sun made Kevin’s thighs shine, and although Everett wore sunglasses, I knew that his eyes bore a lascivious glance, which I shared.

  That was because we had both ‘shared’ Kevin, in a way. As a childhood neighbor over in Forrestville, he and Everett had ‘messed around’ a few times. And during his painful hospitalization after his accident, Everett had basically offered up Kevin as a form of amusement. That a few of our stoned evenings together had taken an occasional, if not one-sided, sexual turn left Kevin unfazed, even though he considered himself straight, with a series of girlfriends to prove it. I wondered how our lives might have changed if I’d known that my handsome high school track teammate was open to the occasional blow job.

  “That should do it,” Kevin wiped his grease-stained hands on a rag as he turned to us with a confused glance. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I shrugged.

  “You two were checkin’ out my butt.”

  “It was hard not to,” Everett argued.

  “Hey, I know we have, you know, history. But I don’t go there.”

  “Of course not,” Everett held his hands up.

  “Yet,” I added.

  “Well, if you can keep from molesting me, you’re welcome to swing by and party a bit before you head out. That is, if you’re not the old married couple you act like.”

  Everett gasped. “We’re not old!”

  The van up and running, we drove over later that day. Although his younger brother was also home, Kevin seemed to have the rule of his family’s house. Set down the street from the Forrester’s larger now-leased mansion, the Muir’s white neo-Colonial, with columns on the porch, remained one of the more prominent homes in the upper-crust neighborhood. The interior, however, displayed a modern style with abstract paintings and shag carpeting in some rooms.

  A Rick Derringer album played in the den as Everett and I sat in haze of pot smoke, pondering the remains of a pizza box.

  While it was nice to talk about “old times,” even though it was only a year ago that we’d been in high school, it felt odd to return to the same room where I’d serviced Kevin.

  Over the blare of the music, we let our host ramble on about his newfound interest in working at his father’s car dealership, usually selling, but occasionally getting his hands dirty with repairs. He also bragged about his new girlfriend.

  “I think she’s the one,” Kevin said, nodding to convince himself. “It’s been, almost as long as you two’ve been together. Hey, you are somethin’ else, by the way.” He stood still, took us in with a glazed look of admiration. “You know, it’s too bad you can’t really get married. I could throw you a helluva bachelor party.”

  “With you as the entertainment?” Everett teased.

  Kevin shrugged, briefly thrust his hips as if it were a possibility, then more casually swayed to the music. “I definitely owe you. There was this guy, single, lookin’ over the compacts, but I kinda worked the charm a little,” –another suggestive thrust– “Then I did whadyou call it, the gay radar.”

  “Gaydar,” Everett corrected.

  Kevin pointed a finger in agreement. “Anywhose, I laid on the charm, got him to get behind a new Corvette; jet black.”

  “Did you give him a test drive?” Everett leered.

  Kevin hooted. “Damn near.”

  Somewhere in my stoned haze, my befuddlement at the course of the conversation made me wonder if we should leave or start taking off our clothes. Were we supposed to admire his known cockteasing talents, and thereby admire him more directly?

  “Say, how’s the job doing?” Kevin asked me as he offered another bong hit. I declined.

  “Okay,” I said, a bit hazy. “Planting season’s mostly done. I helped a few folks put some small shrubs in; that and mulching, selling leaf blowers.”

  My part time job at the Wolfe Nursery was providing some extra money for me to save up for school. But as late in the summer as it was, I spent more time piling up bags of wood chips and shelving pottery.

  “You still visit Ev on the weekends, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I smiled at Everett.

  “Fun in the big city. Hey, I oughtta come with. You guys could show me around.”

  “Sure!” Everett said, a bit too enthusiastically.

  I considered a drive to Pittsburgh in Kevin’s Camaro, our odd relationship, and what might happen. Kevin’s offer seemed innocent enough, but I didn’t agree to any specific plans. Back in high school, being alone with Kevin led to our unbalanced sexual connection. With all this joking flirtation, I wasn’t quite sure that link had been broken.

  “We only have two more weeks until we drive back to Philly, and I’m tryin’ to get as many hours as I can, so I’m not sure when …”

  “Sure, whenever,” Kevin said, a bit dismissively, as he sauntered across the room, ending his macho dance.

  Once we were comfortable enough to feign sobriety, Everett drove the van back to my house where he and I managed to dodge any parental interrogations. It was still early evening, but we retreated to my room, having called out to Mom that we’d already eaten.

  “He seems happy,” Everett said as we undressed and got settled on my bed. I made sure my door was locked. The pot had made me a little amorous; that and Kevin’s company.

  As if reading my mind, which became a more frequent occurrence with Everett, he broke our first embrace with a question.

  “Would you have, if Kevin had wanted to?”

  “What?”

  “You know; a return engagement.”

  “With him? That was just… I was miserable then. I thought you were gone for good.”

  “No, I mean, if I were with you, and him.”

  “What?” I pretended to be shocked, but actually the idea had occurred to me, if Kevin’s brother hadn’t been there. “I don’t…think so. Besides, he’s not… I mean, big dick and all, he’s not very good at it.”

  “But if he was.”

  “Are you–?”

  “Forget it. Just horny stoned thoughts. Come ‘ere. I prefer your big dick
anyway.”

  Although he seemed to have dismissed it, as we fumbled about on my bed, quietly, with music playing more to cover our sounds than inspire us, I began to wonder if I wanted such a situation.

  Did I need sex with an able-bodied guy? I’d grown used to the difference, helping Everett move his legs as we adjusted our bodies, focusing on his chest, on kissing and caressing the more toned muscles in his shoulders and back, and letting him explore my body with increasing ease.

  Once again Everett kept the sex fairly one-sided, him eventually pleasing me, and unable or uninterested in getting an erection or reaching an orgasm, or even a ‘back-ejac,’ as he enthusiastically persisted in giving his attentions to me.

  He must have thought he wanted to share an opportunity, something that could possibly strengthen our connection. But it instead left me with a lingering doubt.

  Halting his insistent clutch to my hips, I rearranged myself and did the same to him, for a long time, stroking him to a rigidity that surprised him. I shifted upward to face him, plant our lips together as I humped him, groin to leg, thrusting between his legs, occasionally poking behind and into him, until I finally got a few spasming bucks of relief out of him and myself. But I kept kissing him, licking and caressing under his arm, longing to cover every inch of his skin with my own, until he shivered and begged me to stop.

  After cleaning ourselves up and cuddling close for the night, I slept well, having convinced myself, having proven that I was enough for him, that we were enough for each other.

  Chapter 9

  September 1980

  “Did you know…?”

  “Not another ‘Did You Know.’”

  As Everett sat at his desk, I lay on the carpeted floor, stretching, since I’d decided to jog across town after taking the Broad Street line from Temple to Center City. Despite the jostling of the books in my backpack, I enjoyed the brisk fall weather. I would take the usual bus and train back, but wanted to enjoy an excuse for a workout, and Everett told me he liked me a bit sweaty.