This world a hunting is
by LC
2/10/03Thank you thank you thank you to the kelise for general fabulousness and betas. If something sucks, it's because I ignored them.
Also to Lise and Maggie for encouraging the banjos.
This is, if you missed it, Chris/Lynn/Justin. No explicit incest, but implied, so if that bothers you don't read it. The title is William Drummond, poem at the end.
The sun is thick and he don't like it. Heavy on his back, on his shoulders, he sweats and turns red like a red rock, like the brick dust in the alleys in town. The weather these days, his mother says, is a sign that God's coming. God's coming soon.
Otherwise, no reason for that winter that came before. It was just six months ago but already he feels like he's grown old in the time between. He and Momma and Chris wrapped themselves up like snakes in the little bed, just two blankets and a bunch of towels and a table cloth Momma had been keeping for sometime special, and Justin clung tight in the middle like a leech.
That winter there was no other way to explain it, he guessed, than God, like Momma said, although Justin does not understand exactly why God coming means bad winters and hot summers all full of mosquitoes. God comes down when he's angry. Justin remembers that from the Bible, from the first part, before Jesus. God gets angry a lot but he never sent a cold freeze to frost off anybody's toes in ancient Israel.
God sent fire all the time.
Fire, though, just makes him think back to the hot wet air chewing at his skin, and he wants to die. Justin leans back against the aluminum siding of the trailer, he picks up his coke bottle and drinks what's left, all warm and flat by now. He's been sitting out under the sun for maybe two hours, though he cannot tell for sure. It's possible JC won't come, for the heat, because nobody in their right mind is wanting to step outside today, just lie in bed with a baggie of ice on your forehead and cry.
Momma is inside in the dark. Justin used to sit next to her when she cried and he stroked her shoulders and her hair, if she didn't have a wet cloth on her forehead, and he kissed her fingers. Not anymore though, because she has Chris now, and Justin has always understood that he's just standing in. He knows she needs Chris, same like she needed Joe, and Jimmy before him. Before Jimmy Justin can't remember.
His life is run according to the weather and according to the names of those men. They have all been good to him. He knows that it more often goes the other way. Britney who is his friend told him about her momma's men. She and Justin sat by the brown stream, in the punch-dent under the bank, where it looks like somebody'd spooned out a spoonful of dirt just big enough for two people to sit all hunched up.
Britney said that the men touched her and made her hurt. They touched her legs, she showed him where. Here and here and here. Justin looked and saw skin like the inside of a dead dog. Britney lives close by and he can hear her momma's men at night, sometimes, the words they yell.
Chris doesn't yell like that and Justin always remembers to give thanks to God and to Jesus for giving his momma a man who doesn't hurt them. Justin's very careful with his giving thanks. He keeps a list of names. The names are Momma, Chris, Joe and Jimmy too because they were good before they were gone, Britney and Britney's momma, all the babies in the world, except he really means in the township because he can't fairly expect God to bless somebody Justin hasn't even ever seen.
Two weeks ago he took out the paper and the half-pencil, all stubby now, and wrote "JC" at the bottom. The prayer he says for JC is just the same, please God bless him keep him good and safe, but Justin knows he's lying because what he's truly been thinking is, please God bring him back. That's bad, to lie to God, and worse even to do it for such a selfish thing. But he can't stop asking for it, every night. Please God bring him back here.
Chris walks through the door with black hands. He lays them on Momma's face when he kisses her, leaves dark smudges across her bones. Momma says, "Wash your hands," but she's smiling, not angry. Chris washes off the grease before he goes to Justin, who is sitting on his bed reading one of the old magazines Momma brings home from the salon each month. He likes the fashion magazines best. He likes to look at people.
"Who's that?" Chris pokes a finger in the man's face, the man on the page. Justin shrugs. The people in the fashion magazines don't have names. "What's he wearing?"
Justin lifts up the magazine to peer at the tiny white letters across the bottom. "Valenty," he tells Chris. "It's old. It's a spring collection."
Chris laughs. Justin can't tell what makes him laugh, yet. He never laughs at jokes, not like Joe did. Joe laughed and taught Justin new ones, ones he wasn't allowed to say to Britney. Justin was sorry when Joe left mostly because he missed that laugh, and the way it made him feel warm and full of hot chocolate. Chris's laugh feels like grabbing a handful of needles in the dark.
"Stop that," Momma says sharply. "Stop laughing at him." Justin looks at her, puzzled, because it didn't feel like Chris was laughing at him. Lots of people do, but not Chris. He wants to tell her, so she won't be angry with Chris. But Chris smiles at him--just a flicker--and shakes his head.
It's been Chris for near seven months now, since the middle of the bad winter. Joe left in September and for three months Justin quit school and mopped floors at the plant. He wasn't old enough to do real work, but they'd planned for him to start once he turned fourteen. Justin knew he would do it, but he had been so scared, watching the men who stumbled back and forth, thick-wristed and skin so dark he thought the grease had sunk in and would never wash off in the kitchen sink. He worked at night, mostly, and an hour after he had arrived all the men would be gone, back home to wash and eat and lay with their wives. Justin walked between the machines, terrified they'd snarl and grind awake, reach out their teeth for him.
Chris works there now, and Justin goes to school most of the time. Chris looks nothing at all like the men Justin remembers. He isn't scared of Chris, but he is scared around him in a way he can't explain. For seven months Justin has been scared in this way, and since February Justin's loved him. Loving him is why he tries to keep track of when Chris laughs and what makes his face pinch up like unsugared lemonade.
Loving him, though, doesn't explain why Justin told Chris about JC. He didn't tell him right away, because Justin never has secrets and then he suddenly owned one, a fine good one, and he had forgotten how good it felt to know something Momma didn't. He was certain he shined so bright with the secret that everyone could see, but he waited until last week to tell Chris, when he asked what was Justin doing standing outside all afternoon.
"I'm waiting for JC," he said. "The man with the banjo, remember?"
For a minute Chris just looked at him. Justin thought maybe he didn't remember the day. It had only been a week ago, but grownups remember differently. He understands this.
Chris said, "He coming back?"
"I don't know. I want him to. I'm waiting so he will."
And Chris nodded, and went inside. Justin heard the low mutters of voices sinking through the walls of the trailer. He listened, though he could not make out any words, because he liked the sound anyway. It kept him from minding the heat so much.
Chris didn't tell Momma and Justin loved him. He wanted to say thank you but that didn't seem like something you said to Chris, not for anything.
Britney says, "I want you to touch me." They are in the hollow underneath the streambank, and wearing next to nothing because it's the hottest summer in the world that ever was. Justin's shorts are thick with dust and sweat. Britney's wearing cut-off jeans and a greyish bra with thick straps. Bits of thread wisp out from the seams and the shoulder straps keep slipping down. Britney tugs them up with a tiny automatic motion of her wrist.
"I want you to touch me." Again. Her hairline is dark with sweat. He presses his palm lightly against her light brown stomach. She looks like bread baked too long.
Justin knows about fucking and maybe this is what it is, his hand on her sweaty sticky skin and the smell of the dead brown water at his toes. Britney kisses him, with her teeth and very fast. When she pulls his hand between her legs, he pulls it back against his body and stands up.
Britney scowls. "What's your problem?"
"I have to go," he says. "I'm waiting for somebody."
"Fuck you too," she says. She sounds like she wants to cry.
He climbs up and walks back to the trailer. The sun beats down so hot and hard that every step forward feels like battling through molasses. The rusted metal tub is still overturned on the grass, and Chris is sitting on it, the same spot where JC sat three and a half weeks ago. Justin sits down next to him. He sat on the tub all the time back in the spring. He liked it there because he had his back to the wall of the trailer and he could see everyone who walked by. Everybody here knows Justin and mostly they love him and smile when he waves.
"What makes you think he's coming back?" Chris looks straight ahead. Justin watches the side of his face, a little grimy even though Chris bathes every day. Even when there's only icy water or when he has to walk into town and catch a bus to the Y. The dirtiness on his skin now is ground-in.
"I want him to," Justin says. Chris laughs. Justin sort of thought he might. He's getting better at knowing when.
"You think that makes things happen?" Looking at him now. His eyes make Justin feel older than fourteen. They make him want to stand up straight.
"I believe so," he says.
When he thinks about it he supposes magic has to come from God. He doesn't like to think it that way though because it takes all the power away. God's what takes the prayers and the songs from church. God's the Bible and Justin loves Him fine enough but for things like hoping to find quarters, or dimes at least, when he walks into town, his eyes on the sidewalk; hoping that the storm will hold back until the kittens under the trailer are done being born; hoping he will see JC as a tiny dot far away and see him closer and closer until he sits down on the turned-over rusted tub and reaches out his hand--
For the things he hopes for, magic works better. Justin always does exactly as he is supposed to, he never leaves out a word in the song and when he walks round a fat tree fifteen times to hold back a rainstorm he never stops at fourteen, never loses count and does too many.
He's gotten older, though, and now his magic means leaning against the trailer, his feet sinking deeper into the dirt and dead clovers where they've been for weeks now. His bare shoulders tingle against the sun-baked metal siding. He wonders what he'll do if JC doesn't come back by the time school starts again. Justin could stand here through the winter, he could turn fifteen with his back against the trailer and watching the dead leaves twitch on the ground, the dead dry leaves.
"Somebody told me you were looking for me." He didn't see him coming.
Justin sees him in pieces. A thin white t-shirt with a faded print, the name of the university sixty miles away. Low-slung jeans, baggy all the way from the tight-cinched belt to the scraped-up sneakers. The black case riding his back. His hands at his sides. He's shaved thin like a piece of soap. All of a sudden, Justin feels like he just woke up all over.
"I wanted you to come back," he says. JC smiles and sits down. A shriveled breeze is struggling through the grass.
JC works in town at the grocery. He lives in a room behind the store in the summer. "I was born here," he says. He waves his hand around to show that he means here, this place by the dead water. His hand looks like a bird. Justin finds dead birds underneath the trailer sometimes. They go there to die after the dogs get at them.
He never thought about looking for JC. It seems ridiculous he never tried, and all this time he could've walked into town and found him counting up cash at the register, lining up cans in paper bags. Justin can't picture him there, doing such a thing. His eyes flicker to the black case strapped across JC's back. He asks, "Why'd you come here?"
"No reason I guess." JC shrugs. "I wanted to see what was going on. I like to look around."
He wants to ask, why'd you stop for me? But he feels that it would be impertinent. It would be like asking questions in Sunday school. He wants to know so bad, though, what JC saw that made him stop his slow rolling walk and lift his hand and smile, brighter even than the sun.
"Would you play something again?" he asks. "Please."
Before JC walks away he kisses the top of Justin's head. He kisses the same spot that Momma used to kiss, when Justin was little and sat on her lap. She used to kiss him there all the time, surprising him, lifting him up into her arms when he couldn't see her coming up behind him.
JC isn't coming back. Justin asked if he would and JC looked sad, his face turned like dark water. He said he was going away. He said he had to go away for the rest of the summer, and then he was going back to school.
"You've got to go right away?" Justin knew he shouldn't ask because it was rude to make JC explain himself but he couldn't stand it. He'd only just found JC, and nobody else had, it was Justin who had found him and it wasn't fair to steal him away as if he didn't belong to Justin. It made him angry.
"Tomorrow," JC said. "I have to go tomorrow. I wanted to come see you before I left." And Justin is polite, so he understood that JC's eyes were closed shut about the matter. He put out a hand to stroke the smooth shiny skin of the banjo. JC's hand, long and thin, blanketed his own and pressed it against the polished wood. Justin closed his eyes and sighed. He felt JC's lips brush the top of his head, and then the hand and the banjo slipped away.
All afternoon long Justin sits with his arms on his knees, counting and losing count. He feels a stern, sharp-toothed hate for Momma and he can't bear it. Every time he looks up and sees the rusting tub he hates her. This is how Chris finds him when evening comes.
The mosquitoes are gathering as the light fades. He slaps at his skin without really noticing. Chris says, "You better come inside. You'll be eaten alive."
Justin turns his head so he can't see Chris, not even from the corner of his eye. He expects to get yelled at for sass, which Momma would do, and hauled up by the arm. But there's nothing for a second and then the creak and slap of the door leaving him alone outside. He follows a minute later, brushing dirt off his legs. His legs keep getting longer. He doesn't know when they'll choose to stop but he hopes soon because the stretching out makes his bones hurt bad enough to cry.
The door barks shut behind him and Momma snaps "Wash your hands" without even turning around. She's cutting things up next to the sink, something's boiling on the stove, her voice is stretched tight like an e-string. Justin looks at Chris, confused, his hands hovering scared in front of him. Chris won't look up from the button he's sewing on his shirt. The tight hurt swells up in his throat so fast, bewildering quick and Justin has to bite down hard on the fat of his palm before he can breathe deep enough to shove back down the noise. Chris looks at him then, all right. Justin goes and washes his hands.
Momma is standing next to him but she might as well be a stick of ice for all he can feel her. He can smell the carrots thicker than he feels her. She chops them hard and leaves fingernail-size scars in the counter.
"Momma, what's the matter?"
"What was he doing here?" She spits out the words like bullets. For a second Justin thinks she means Chris, and he stares at her helpless, his throat a long black tunnel to his feet. And then he understands.
"He was playing for me," he says. "You remember, he came by three weeks ago?"
"Yeah I remember." She chops the last thumb of the last carrot and lays the knife down with a clatter. "I don't know what business he thinks he has out here--and other people's children--he won't be back anymore, I tell you that."
"I know," Justin says slowly. "I know, he's going away. He told me." A thought strikes him, chrome-silver and unpleasant. "You know him?"
"Everybody knows about that boy."
That's not the same thing. "I didn't."
She slaps him, snapping his head to one side. It's the first time in his life anyone's hit him. He doesn't say a word. Neither does Momma, or Chris over on the sofa. All he can hear is the thumping roll of the water boiling and Momma's high rabbity breathing.
He reaches for her as she reaches for him and his arms wrap tight around her in a circle. He drops his head, buries his face in the soft pillow skin of her neck where she smells like powder and detergent and onions. "I'm sorry. Momma I'm sorry. I'm sorry." She rocks him back and forth, laying kisses in his hair. He kisses her back, ecstatic, delirious, terrified. The potatoes burn.
Chris knows the names of stars. He started teaching them to Justin in the winter, the middle of February when it started to warm up enough to sit outside wrapped in a blanket and old towels, wrapped around each other. Justin likes Orion the best, because he's the easiest to find and looks the most like what he's supposed to be. Most of the constellations don't look anything like what they're called. He saw a book of stars once at school and they had to draw fancy pictures around the stars to show you where the shape was. That was as good as cheating, if you had to have it pointed out to you.
Orion looks like a man with a belt and a club and shoes. Like a hunter. Justin can always find him, even on bright nights.
Chris is leaning against the trailer with his eyes closed when Justin steps outside. He closes the door carefully, so it won't slam. When Chris doesn't move Justin walks up and stands next to him. "I just wanted him to come back," he says, his voice soft like wind. He wishes he'd known that all this time he could have found JC on his own. He wishes he'd thought to look. Instead of standing in the sun day in, day out, for three weeks, digging his feet into the ground. He could've walked for half an hour and found him.
Now he will never hear the sound of those strings again, the long fingers lying light across his own hand, gone.
"Why do you care so much?" Chris's eyes don't open. "You don't know him. You saw him twice."
Justin doesn't know what to say. Somewhere in him there is an answer full of words he doesn't know yet. Words that climb up his throat and choke in his mouth. He starts to walk away, towards the creek, where he goes more and more lately without Britney. Chris says, "Come here," and Justin turns on a dime and goes back.
When Chris pulls their faces close together and takes Justin's hand in his, Justin knows. Chris lifts their hands and points at the line of three stars hanging against the dark bruised-blue sky. He moves their hands slowly and Justin says the name of each constellation as they come to it. "Gemini." Twins. "Auriga." Charioteer. Then Perseus and Andromeda, chained to her rock, her legs flailing in panic. Justin feels Chris's breath warm against his cheek.
They move across the sky and then Justin turns his face a little and says "thank you," softly, not sure if it'll be welcome. Chris's body against his becomes a tight straight line.
"What's that for?"
And then Justin knows. His chest opens up like an impossible flower. "For getting him here," he says. He looks down so Chris won't have to look at him. His heart is beating so fast he can feel it thudthudding in his throat. This is what he was supposed to be feeling by the creek, with his spread fingers pressed to her belly. He wants to put it in a box, something with a lock on it, a tight heavy lock.
"Who told you I did that?"
Justin shakes his head, smiling against Chris's shirt. "Nobody. I just knew."
"Justin," Chris says. Justin looks up. "Don't tell Momma."
"Course I won't. I wouldn't."
"She worries about you," Chris says. His arm wraps around Justin and everything is good. Everything is fine.
He sleeps with Momma tonight as they do sometimes when they can't bear to be apart. He cradles her back and pets her calves with his toes and smells the back of her neck, drops light little kisses beneath her hair. He loves her and loves her and loves her.
She laughs sleepily and snuggles back against him. She's warm like when he held the newborn kittens in his hand, vital warm, like he can feel right down to her insides. "My baby," she says, her voice slushy with sleep. He kisses her shoulder until his mouth hurts.
Chris lays on the other side of Momma. Their faces are together. Justin likes to watch them kiss because they love each other so much and he can see it. He likes to watch Momma in love, it makes her beautiful. He watches, but he's tired, and he's half-asleep when Chris lifts her leg up around his own hip and slides inside her, making her give out a low groan, lower than her talking voice. Justin rubs his face between her shoulder blades and falls asleep to the rhythm of her body rocking against him. He dreams a long, confusing dream about chairs that change size when he sits on them.
He wakes up sweaty to the snarl of trucks outside. Late morning light through the crooked blinds dusts everything. Momma looks like a movie star in the soft light. He puts a hand on her shoulder and her eyes open.
"Hey baby," she says. "God, I'm hungry. We missed breakfast, I think."
"I think it's lunch. I'll go make you a sandwich." He kisses her mouth light like a leaf and crawls over her out of bed. As he's spreading mayonnaise across two pieces of toast she stumbles into the kitchenette, tying her robe loose beneath her breasts and yawning.
"Where's Chris?"
Justin shrugs. "Should I go look for him?"
She picks up a raw slice of bread and starts to chew on it. "No, he'll come around whenever. You know how he is."
Momma leans against the fridge and chews lazily while Justin folds bologna and cheese. They eat the sandwiches standing up. The blinds don't close all the way, and through them Justin sees Chris pacing back and forth outside. His face shows up in snatches between the crooked strips of plastic, flashing bright and almost familiar before disappearing again.
"Momma," he says. He should tell her. She looks at him and he changes his mind. "I'm sorry I brought JC here," he says instead. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you."
"Shhhh." She presses his lips with a finger all sticky with crumbs. "Don't even think about it." Her pink robe is dotted with toast crumbs. He finishes the sandwich and washes the knife before putting it away.
This world a hunting is,
The prey poor man,
The Nimrod fierce is death.
His speedy greyhounds are
Lust, sickness, envy, care,
Strife that ne'er falls amiss,
With all those ills which haunt us
While we breathe.
Now if by chance we fly
Of these the eager chase,
Old age with stealing pace
Casts up his nets,
and there we panting die.--William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649)