Uncle Sean Read online

  “I’ve been hurt worse’n this, Will,” he said, seeming to realize my concern.

  “But in the face like that? Those welts look pretty bad.”

  He just shrugged and sopped up his egg yellow with a piece of toast.

  The girls came in one-by-one. Trinket said hello to Lance in a sleepy little voice before she found the pitcher of chocolate milk that Mama had already made. She popped two pieces of bread in the toaster and got out peanut butter and jelly. She was wearing one of my t-shirts that fit her like a nightie. May was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and boots, and she said hi to Lance and asked him how he was feeling before she got busy fixing her own breakfast. Mama was teaching the girls how to cook, and May didn’t like her eggs the way Mama fixed them. So Mama made her own plate and came to the table and sat across from Lance and me.

  Then Rita came in. She was always last these days, because she had taken to wearing makeup and wouldn’t come to the table until she had on lipstick and stuff, even when she wasn’t going anywhere. Mama didn’t like it, but Rita had won. She just poured herself a cup of coffee and came to the table and sat down next to Lance on the other side.

  She also said hello and asked about his face, and then she asked where Daddy was.

  It seemed like that was what Mama was waiting on, and even though Lance was here, she said Daddy didn’t look too good at all and that we should try to be quiet.

  I couldn’t eat at all, hearing that, so I pushed my plate away and drank my coffee.

  Mama said Daddy had a bad night, kind of sick to his stomach, though I hadn’t heard anything, and I guess I must’ve slept like the dead not to have heard.

  “You ought to take him to the doctor,” Rita said. “He’s been looking bad to me for several days, Mama.”

  “He ain’t gonna go,” Mama said back. “I’ve tried to get him in there for a check up.”

  And so the family talk at the breakfast table went, and Lance seemed to take it all in as though he’d never heard such talk, and maybe he hadn’t, if it was just him and his mother and stepfather. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like with such a small family and having a monster for a father.

  So I finally spoke up and told Mama I’d take Daddy in myself if he wouldn’t go with her. As it was, I had been taking over more and more of the responsibilities in the last couple of years and Mama listened to me. I had even put in a crop of alfalfa last year where we used to raise cotton, and neither Mama or Daddy objected.

  I put in the alfalfa, because I had read where it enriched the soil and would produce for about five years. I also thought hay would be a good cash crop to sell to the ranchers. It took more water than the other crops, but I didn’t have to cultivate and make row beds, so it left me a little more free without Daddy’s help.

  So Mama’s talk of Daddy being sick made all that responsibility come back, and I glanced over at Lance, feeling kind of sick myself, because I knew I had to run the farm and I was hoping that he would be here to help. Only I was afraid, now that Daddy was sick, that Mama wouldn’t want the added burden of Lance—because no telling what kind of ruckus his stepfather would raise with the county sheriff’s office, or the state police. Everybody knew everybody else in and around Hachita, so it would only be a day or so at most before everyone knew about the runaway kid. And if anybody saw Lance—even Dosier Duffus—they would be able to figure out he was the runaway. Strangers got noticed in this area, so I couldn’t even take him into Hachita for a coke, much less the doctor in Lordsburg, if he needed it.

  I was wearing a t-shirt and Levi’s and for a minute or so, as I sat there half listening to the talk, I was rubbing my chest, so I could feel Uncle Sean’s dog tags. And he was right, it brought him back and what had turned out to be my need for his wisdom; even though he was only twenty-five, he seemed to have more real answers to things than Mama and Daddy, sometimes.

  After breakfast, Mama and I went into their bedroom, and in the daylight I could see that Daddy’s color wasn’t good at all. So I woke him up as gently as I could and told him I was taking him in to the doctor.

  He tried to object, and even managed a good bark, but I said, “No, Daddy. Mama and everybody’s worried about you, and even if you ain’t sick enough for the doctor, you gotta set Mama’s mind to rest.”

  “I jes need to sleep, Will. Go on, now,” he said. But even his voice sounded sick, and that did it. I helped Mama put on his pants and pull on a shirt, and I noticed for the first time how one side of his stomach was kind of bloated, like a balloon, and I wondered how long it had been that way. We messed with Daddy, trying to get him dressed, and when we did, he was mad enough to get up and shuffle into the kitchen like an old man. “Least let me have a cup of danged coffee, then!” he said.

  The girls busied themselves cleaning up the kitchen and I noticed that Lance was pitching in, though he was really in the way. I smiled that Trinket had latched onto him like she had Uncle Sean, and he seemed to enjoy the attention.

  So when it was time to take Daddy to the doctor, I was about to tell Lance that I’d be back later, but Mama took her car keys out of her purse. “You stay here, Will,” she said. “Your daddy don’t need to ride in that old pickup. I’ll take the car.”

  In a way, I was relieved, because I didn’t want to leave Lance by himself with my sisters—not that they wouldn’t be polite, but even with all the commotion of getting Daddy up and ready to leave, half my mind and a whole lot of my feelings were focused on Lance.

  Deep down, I knew that, at most, we’d only have a few days together, before we had to face either his stepfather or the cops—or both.

  ***

  “How come you don’t have no farm animals?” Lance asked, when I was showing him around the farmyard. He and I were by ourselves, and even though I was worried about what the doctor would find wrong with Daddy, and there was kind of a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach about it, I was happy, in a way, too. The girls wouldn’t come out in the heat (except maybe May), so I figured he and I could do just about anything we wanted and not have to worry about being seen.

  Not that I was going to do anything that was too fast, too soon. But I had it in mind to kiss Lance and maybe hold him, if he felt like it. Only there was still that stranger-thing that had risen up in my mind about him, so I was skittish and afraid to lead things in that direction.

  “We used to keep a milk cow,” I said, as we got on the south side of the barn, “and chickens and rabbits.” I’d shown him the long row of empty rabbit hutches still lined up on the north side of the barn, where the sunlight didn’t ever beat down.

  “But you ain’t even got a dog,” he said. He was on my right side, and I glanced at his face, and saw that the bruises looked terrible out in the heat, and I was afraid that too much sun would burn his bruises, so I led him into the barn. It wasn’t nearly as hot, though kind of stifling.

  “We had one once, but Daddy never thought it was much use having a pet to feed,” I said. We were standing in the middle of the lower floor, where we kept the tractors and the cotton picker. I’d been working on taking the picker off the old International Harvester tractor and the basket was held up on an A-frame hoist.

  “What’s that?” Lance asked, looking up at the basket, dangling about eight feet above our heads.

  “It’s a prison where I keep runaways,” I said.

  Lance laughed at that, then suddenly, he took my right hand in his left. “I can’t stand it any more, Will. You haven’t even made a pass at me!”

  “I was afraid,” I said, turning toward him.

  “Since last night?” Even in the gloom of the barn, I could see the violet of his eyes and the purple of his bruises and the pink of his lips. “I thought you knew how I feel about you, Angel.”

  I didn’t know how to explain what I’d been going through since morning, but all that melted away when he moved against me still holding my hand. When our lips touched, it was like sinking into a hot bath, at first almost too hot, the
n I could feel all the tensions melting away, and we just went at it, though I was careful about his left side, where one of the bruises came down to the corner of his mouth.

  We pressed our bodies together, and he began to rub his crotch against me. Since I was a head taller, I had to drop down a little to meet it with my own. Through both our Levi’s, I could feel that he had a stiff-on, just like me, and we ground our hips into each other, and I began to wonder if we were going to go further. But I had had this dream, ever since I’d seen Uncle Sean in his bedroom with no clothes on of lying with a boy in bed.

  I had no idea what we would do if we did end up in bed, but I pulled away, and held both his hands and looked into his eyes at the questions there.

  “I want to be in bed with you,” I said. “To do that.”

  He grinned at me with a puzzled expression. “Do what?”

  “You know,” I said, lacking any of the words to describe something I had no real idea about. “Be with you.”

  He nodded, then, and pressed himself against me. And we started in kissing again, until I was about to burst. Then he pulled away and held my hands and looked into my eyes.

  “You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

  I began to shake a little, and all I could do was nod.

  “Then it’s going to be special,” he said, “when we do it.”

  “You’re not a…a virgin?” I asked, feeling the dread in my stomach churn a little—partly it was still about Daddy, but it was also about Lance.

  He shook his head.

  We were still holding hands and he began pulling me deeper into the barn, looking over his shoulder as he backed up, then looking back at me. “Where can we sit?”

  I led him up into the loft and we sat down on the bale of hay where I usually wrote in my notebook.

  Once we were up here, Lance told me about the other guys he’d had sex with, and I didn’t like any of it, because it sounded so cold, maybe even sad. And I learned something that morning, up in the loft, where I had written and had my wet dreams…my silly, childish dreams about having a boyfriend.

  I learned that Uncle Sean had been trying to protect me from an emptiness so sad, I couldn’t even imagine it, until Lance told me his story. The guys he’d had sex with picked him up on the streets in New Orleans, where he hung out a lot, dreading to go home. He said they fed him, because he stayed away from home a lot and was hungry, and he would agree to go with them if they would buy him food, sometimes even put him up for the night.

  I didn’t even ask what they did with him. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to find out for myself. No wonder, when I’d come along and found Lance out in the desert and he was hungry and I offered him food, as well, his old ways just kicked in, and he was willing to have sex with me, as if I was no different than the guys who had picked him up off the street.

  It was sad hearing his story, too, because Lance didn’t cry about it, or for that matter, laugh or joke about it. It was just something he did. Which made it cold, and the dread in the pit of my stomach grew. I didn’t know how I was going to tell him what I was thinking, but I had to give it a try, because I did not want to be like the men who had picked him up. I wanted him to have deep, lovely feelings for me—the way I felt about him.

  I was afraid he didn’t feel the same way, though. And again, I looked at him like the stranger he was.

  We were both sweating like pigs up in the loft, and his welts and bruises didn’t look any better, and I wondered if it was bad for sweat to run over them.

  So that’s how I began to tell him what I’d been thinking—talking about his physical wounds, first, then moving on to those inside wounds that seemed to make him like Uncle Sean.

  “Maybe we should put more monkey blood on those,” I said. We were sitting face to face and, up here, it was bright and I could see the minute details of the purple welts. I touched his face gently, and he looked into my eyes.

  “Does that hurt?”

  He shook his head. “Not as much as it did.”

  Then I leaned over and just barely touched my lips to his, and he kissed gently back.

  “Why do you call me ‘Angel’?”

  “Because you are,” he said. I think his smile was genuine, but I needed to push.

  “Did you ever call any of those other guys that?”

  Something passed over his face. Was it hurt? Surprise? Anger? I couldn’t tell, but tears began to form on his lower lids, and he smiled sadly. “Is that what you think?” he said.

  “What?”

  “That I think of you like the tricks in New Orleans?”

  I had never heard the term ‘trick’, but I knew what he meant. “Well, maybe,” I said. “Because I offered to take you into town for burgers, and I ended up feeding you, Lance. Just like you said about the guys in New Orleans.”

  He smiled at me, still with sadness around the edges of his eyes. “I guess I can see why you’d think that, then. But no. I didn’t think of those others as angels, because they let me know what they wanted right away, and there was always a price. I had to pay for my food, Will. Had to pay for my bed and bath.”

  I felt a little better. “So then why do you call me ‘Angel’?”

  This time he smiled at me without sadness and took one of my hands and kissed the palm, then held it to his wounds. “Because you are.”

  Te n

  ———————▼———————

  Later on, I took Lance around the fields, just as I had Uncle Sean that December morning. But at least the fields were green, now, especially the alfalfa, which I had planted in the field north of the house. I was really gambling on it paying for itself, without having to put much labor into it. And I have to admit that it sure looked beautiful to me, with its deep green against the browns and purples and pinks of the hills and mountains—all canopied over by the pure blue sky without a single cloud from horizon to horizon. From the north field, we could see the smelter plant etched against the sky.

  “I sure hope that son-of-a-bitch is in deep shit with Mom,” Lance said. And again, memories of the stranger I’d met on the rock ledge came back. There was deep bitterness and hatred in Lance’s voice, and it made me cringe to hear it. Again, his wounds seemed raw like Uncle Sean’s.

  “In deep because you’re mom will blame him since you’re gone?”

  He nodded, still looking out toward the smelter plant. “Though I doubt he’ll miss a single hour of work. And I’ll just bet they fuck like they always do, whether they know where I am or not.”

  It was like being slapped to hear Lance’s hard words. But I didn’t blame him. Don’t ask me why I never took up cursing. Daddy never did, and neither did Mama. But I’d heard all the hard words like that all my life from the other boys. I just never liked using them.

  “Then maybe they won’t even send out word that you’re missing,” I said. “Maybe we don’t have to worry about the cops coming”—

  “But I could be dead!” Lance said. “You’d think Mom at least would worry, wouldn’t you?” This last was not a question meant for me. It sounded like a question he’d been asking himself for a long time. Maybe every night he spent away from home in the beds he’d paid for with his body. I felt tears sting my eyes to realize that he didn’t have any love in his life, if he doubted that even his mother wouldn’t really care.

  He had been sitting on the other side of the pickup from me. We’d been holding hands, though, and it was nice. But he moved up against me in the seat and threw his arms around my neck, trying to kiss me, and I had to take my foot off the gas pedal, and shift down, so I could take him in my arms and hold him.

  “They don’t care about me, Will. That’s the truth. I’d hoped Mom would, you know? But she doesn’t. She never did, I guess.”

  He began to sob into my chest, and I eased the pickup to a stop before I ran off into the field. I held him against me, hard, the way Uncle Sean had done me that night we came back from the movies, when he’d kissed me, and I re
alized he’d been crying the whole time he was trying to tell me we couldn’t be boyfriends.

  And now it was my turn to hold somebody like Uncle Sean had done me. Only I wasn’t nearly as wise as he was, because I couldn’t imagine the pain Lance felt, the kind that would make him doubt his own mother. I couldn’t say a thing.

  We began kissing again, and I could feel how wet his face was from his tears, just like mine. We smashed our lips together and crushed our bodies against each other, and he ripped at my t-shirt, running his hands down into my Levi’s, laying me back against the door, crawling on top of me, kissing and licking my face until my skin was slick, and I kissed him back like that, tasting the salt of his sweat, running my tongue down his neck and into his ears.

  But I couldn’t stop thinking that this wasn’t how we should do it. He had my t-shirt up around my armpits and had pushed Uncle Sean’s dog tags out of the way and was licking the sweat from my chest, and the whole time, pulling at my Levi’s, trying to get them off. And I held on, trying to match his ferocity, but thinking, no. No. Not like this, though I didn’t know what we were supposed to do.

  I pulled Lance up to my face, and in the glare of the sunlight coming into the windows of the pickup, could see how beautiful he was, bruised or not. I held him a little away from me. His eyes were glazed over with the same desire I felt, and I could have done it right then, out in the field, but I knew what it was that made me stop.

  “You don’t want to make love?” Lance asked, breathing kind of heavy. “I’m going to burst if we don’t!”

  I felt calm, now, though maybe not wise as I wanted to be. “I do,” I said, laughing a little at my own ignorance and the look in Lance’s face. “But not out here. That wouldn’t be making love, would it? I’m not going to just…” (I couldn’t say ‘fuck’) “you know…bang you and let you leave, Lance. You don’t have to be afraid.”