
ISBN:978-1-935540-01-4
All rights reserved.Copyright ©2009 Jordan Castillo Price
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This story is for my editor, Emilie. I strongly suspect she talks to her plants.
There was a time when I would've been able to carry the biggest shrub in the yard without breaking a sweat. The yew I was currently loading up was big, no doubt, but I was only bearing half the weight. My brother Chip had the other end of the root ball. And even so, the strain of maneuvering that damn bush into the back of the van just about killed me.
"God damn it, Tony, pull." Chip gave the root ball a shove that crushed my hand against the door hinge and I saw stars. I lost my grip for a second and lurched to recover, even though moving fast under all that weight was gonna come back to bite me in the ass later. I couldn't just drop the yew on Chip---it'd squash him. And then I'd never hear the end of it.
I tried to brace my good leg and pull harder, get the lousy root ball up over the bumper, but it was no use. Leaves slicked the bottoms of my boots and I had no choice but to catch myself with my other leg---the useless leg---and the pain that shot up my spine was a cold, relentless kind of pain, nothing at all like the pain of my skinned knuckles. It was a pain that promised to linger. For days.
My good leg caught on the lip of the corrugated bed and finally I had leverage. I hauled one more time, and the burlap cleared the bumper.
I let go and wiped my forehead on my sleeve. I was drenched. Even my upper lip was wet.
"If you can't cut it," Chip said, "maybe you re-think selling your third of the business to Sal and me."
Sal and me, Sal and me.... It never ended. "Maybe Sal and you should have been the ones out here loading the truck."
Of the three of us, I was the youngest brother, and the biggest. And I figured I'd done a lifetime's worth of hauling for Sal and Chip in the years before the accident. I'd never said as much out loud---but I'd done my damnedest to convey it with looks that were nasty enough to peel paint.
Not that Chip noticed. He liked his beer cold, his TV loud, and his dinner on the table when he came home from work. It took more than a pissy look to let the air out of Chip's tires. "Alls I'm saying," he rambled on, "is you take your cut, maybe you can go to school."
"Oh God, not this again."
"You don't wanna go to Penn State? How 'bout the community college? I heard you can bring in forty, forty-five grand a year with a two-year degree."
"What the hell do I want a degree for?" Potosi and Sons. That was all I'd ever wanted to do, from the first time Dad let me work the backhoe.
"Don't be stupid---you could figure out a way to get some kind of desk job."
"I don't want a desk job."
"I'd think you'd jump at the chance...since your back didn't heal right, and whatnot."
My back. A daydream that featured a yew with a three-hundred-pound root ball falling on Chip---ideally from about ten feet off the ground---gave me something to almost smile about. It wasn't my back that'd been broken. It was my pelvis. Apparently the two-syllable word was one syllable too many for my Neanderthal brother.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and headed back toward the office, and did my best not to limp. It cost me. But everything in life has a cost, doesn't it?
The phone was ringing when I came through the door, and I heard a series of sounds that had grown so familiar to me I could picture them without even poking my head around the doorframe. The clatter of computer keys---my brother Sal finishing a thought. A sigh---he hates being interrupted, unless the customer happens to be both female and available. A squall of old metal as he leaned back in the ancient office chair---a piece of furniture that weighed as much as a yew, with horsehair stuffing hanging out the splits in the leatherette seat, a holdover from dad's regime that Sal, the oldest, claimed as his birthright. The thunk of his boot heels on the desk as he prepared to do business. Then a moment of silence as the ringing stopped and he raised the receiver to his ear. "Potosi and Sons."
They were just phone-words, as empty as "hello" and "how are you" and "have a nice day." But after the buyout conversation in the back of the van, the greeting rubbed me the wrong way.
I hit the work sink to splash off some of the sweat, but even over the thunder of the water into the deep metal basin, I could still pick out Sal's voice. "You want what? Really? But you'll want to transplant hazel in the Spring. I got some hostas you can fill in with, half off...uh, yeah, sure, we got it. Uh-huh. Youse got a truck, or you want it delivered and installed? Okay, gimme the address."
The cold water felt good on my hands, my face, but the whole core of my body throbbed where I'd caught that yew the wrong way---and yeah, even my back would be aching well into the night---but my knees too, and my hips, especially my hips.
I pulled some rough brown paper from the dispenser and blotted my face. I could take stock for the rest of the day---Sal and Chip hated dealing with numbers that didn't have dollar signs in front of them, so when I pulled out the inventory sheet they gave me plenty of room. I'd go through our evergreens for the rest of the day, drive home with a hot pack against my lower back, and settle in with some Vicodin when I got back to my apartment. No problem.
"Tony, we got another one of them chump-changers." Unless you were willing to drop a grand to have your yard graded or your perfectly good old growth replaced with new hybrids that looked just like your neighbors' azaleas and forsythias, you were chump change to Sal. "You want to do the dropoff?"
Maybe---if they weren't in the market for yew. I wouldn't mind getting in my truck that much sooner and breaking open the heat pack. "What're they...?"
"Hazel, three units. I think we got some leftover stock in Greenhouse Four."
I did the inventory, not Sal. Corylus americana. Greenhouse Two. Maybe forty pounds each---a lot more back-friendly than the yew. I'd manage. I turned toward the door carefully, so as not to aggravate my aching hip.
"And get this," Sal went on. "It's at the Hook House."
I almost stopped mid-turn, but as I paused, a pain shot down my thigh and up my spine that kept me going until I was facing the door. The Hook House---was he kidding? Some joke.
The Hook House wasn't what most people would think---a piece of property owned by a family named Hook. The Hook House was a teetering old Victorian about half a mile away from our Grandpa Tito's old apartment---God rest his soul. When Sal was twelve, Chip was ten and I was seven and not yet bigger than the two of them, we used to jimmy loose a rusted picket of the wrought iron fence and dare each other to get closer to the house, which was obviously cursed, haunted, or filled with axe murderers.
On the day the Hook House got its name, we were maybe a dozen yards or so away from the east side of the building, shivering in the shadow cast by the single turret, when Chip launched into the re-telling of a yarn he'd picked up at camp. Chip's not what I'd call a gifted storyteller, so at ten he couldn't have spooked even our wimpy cousin Carl. But right as he fumbled his way to the money shot---the bloody hook dangling from the car door---I caught a glimpse of something in the overgrown weeds, a patch of moss, emerald green, against milky gray stone. I inched forward, and it took me a minute to register the stone was man-made, that it had letters carved in it, and dates.
That we were standing there on top of graves.
They both thought it was Chip's dumb story that'd sent me hurtling back toward the broken fencepost, back to Grandpa Tito's kitchen that smelled like gravy and pipe tobacco. They had a good laugh at my expense, and ever since then, the old house was "Hook House" to them.
I'd gone back myself a few years later, after the growth spurt that'd left me towering over every other member of my family, when I was a badass fifteen-year-old who'd forgotten the meaning of fear. The Hook House looked more spindly than I'd remembered it, more decayed, but just as imposing. The picket was still loose, but I was too big to cram through the gap.
Maybe I was relieved.
Even so, I sat there on my idling dirt bike and smoked through half a pack of Marlboro Reds and just watched. The grass rustled once, and an albino squirrel darted up an old Sugar Maple. That was all.
I don't think I'd ever understood deja vu before, not deep down in the pit of my gut, but staring at that gate from the cab of the Potosi Brothers van---and wanting a smoke, needing a smoke, for the first time in years---suddenly, I did.
Since the last time I'd seen Hook House, someone had spruced up the old building with a fresh coat of lavender paint, white on the trim, and the vast fenced-in yard that had once gone to weed was different now---more meadow than vacant lot, with bursts of late-summer color. But even though the building looked different now, inhabited, and even though I couldn't possibly be idling in that very same spot I'd smoked myself sick, I still expected to look down and see a pile of brown cigarette butts smoked all the way down to the filter littering the ground at my feet.
Except I was in a van. And I didn't smoke. And there was nothing spooky at all about the Hook House.
Nothing but the burial plot.
The door of the detached stone shed slammed, and the noise was muted by the distance, and the grasses, trees and wildflowers in between, but I still heard it through the closed window. A tall man emerged and beckoned. I rolled down my window, and he called out, "Gate's open," then went back inside.
I'd kinda figured, given that he was expecting a delivery. It wasn't any locked gate that had me glued to my seat, though. It was a bum pelvis and a heaping helping of been-here, done-that.
I could hardly turn around and drive back to the greenhouse with a truck full of hazel without having to answer to Chip or Sal, or worse, both of them, so I climbed out of the cab, hauled open the wrought iron gate, and pulled the van inside.
I left the gate open behind me and hoped they weren't keeping anything important inside.
The pitted gravel driveway approached the Hook House at an incline, and I felt the stock shift in back as I climbed the hill. "Just a little ways more," I told the plants. Yeah, I talked to 'em, always had. I figured if they could hear Mozart playing, according to those studies they did a few years back, then there was a chance that talking nice might make one of us feel better.
A new door, bright red with leaded glass, jazzed up the front of the building. From up close it didn't look like the Hook House, not anymore, and it didn't really feel like it either. I glanced from the house to the shed, expecting to be hit with flashbacks of Indian burns and dangling loogies, but the shed had changed even more than the house. Instead of the weeds that once choked it, a border of barely controlled herbs and wildflowers wrapped around the old stone. Smoke poured through the old metal flue. I'd never even realized there was a stove inside---and it seemed like an awfully warm day to be running it.
I eased myself out of the van and approached the shed. "Hello?" I cupped my hands around my eyes to try and see through the screening, but the angle of the sun reflected off the metal and all I saw was my own shadow.
"Come in. It's open."
I flinched. I hadn't realized the guy who lived there was standing right on the other side of the door. I swung it open and my eyes took a second to adjust to the dim interior of the old stone shed.
Once I got a look at him, I paused again. My type. I hadn't been expecting that---not out here in the boonies. My type was usually checking his e-mail on an iPhone at Starbucks. Or maybe he owned the Starbucks. Or better yet, he owned the coffee shop that wasn't yet a Starbucks, that had paintings by local artists on the walls and didn't insist that their smallest size was a "Tall."
My type was artsy without trying. He was pretty and masculine at the same time. He was confident, and he was complicated.
"Have we met before?" he asked.
Maybe I was staring, but I made like I was blinking the light out of my eyes. "Anthony Potosi," I said, and I went for a handshake before I thought of making sure I didn't have soil on my hands. It's just a hazard of being a landscaper, but it tends to put off the type of guy who'd wear a scarf, or make a cappuccino, or hold season tickets to the Philharmonic.
"David Dean." He took my hand and shook it before I could take it back. I glanced down at his hand---there was reddish clay worked into the creases of his knuckles. He noticed me noticing, and gave my hand an extra pump to show me that he knew. The corner of his mouth turned up. And his eyes---damn, his eyes were striking, not brown like mine, like most everyone I knew, but a greenish, brownish flecked gold. And his eyelashes, so long they were tangled, thick and black---like his hair, which kinda curled, or maybe it had just fallen that way when he wiped the sweat out of his eyes.
'Cos it really was hot in there. Not just him.
"Where are you putting in the shrubs?" I asked---because I needed an excuse to end that handshake before I did anything crazy, like pull him toward me to double check if that lingering eye contact and that small, knowing smile meant what I thought it meant.
"You can bring them inside."
"The shed?" Brilliant---you'd think I was trying to perpetuate the myth of all brawn, no brain.
David's knowing smile deepened.
"Are you putting them in today?" I asked him. "They'll dry out in here."
"They're not for the garden. They're for the kiln."
I glanced over his shoulder like I'd been cued, and maybe I had. The thing I'd taken for an oversized wood stove was a kiln. Something inside it popped, then let out a series of crackles that sounded like a dried-up wheeze.
"Oh." Again, with the brilliance.
"I work with clay."
Thus, the kiln. Right. "And the wood makes that much of a difference? I mean, it's got to get expensive, ordering plants just to...." To kill them. I told myself to knock it off. If he paid for the shrubs he should be able to run them through a woodchipper for all I cared---but it still sounded screwy to me. "There's wood everywhere---you'd think it grows on trees or something."
He laughed, a sharp "ha" that bubbled up out of him before he could check it, and I got a glimpse of someone genuine beneath that carelessly handsome exterior...and I was such a goner. "Clay is like alchemy. Earth, fire, air---it all comes together. I think it makes a difference. Yes."
"It's your dime. Where do you want them?"
"Over there." David pointed---and at first I saw a wall of clutter in the dimness, but as I looked closer it resolved itself into floor-to-ceiling shelves full of boxes and jars. I almost glanced right over them, but then I looked harder. Dried herbs and flowers? Yes. But other things, too. Shells. Stones. Rusty nails.
"When the heat gets high enough---if it's a good day, and I reach temperature, which is always tricky in this kiln---metals and minerals vaporize. The colors they release are captured by the glaze."
There had to be an easier way to color something---spray paint, for instance---but I sensed that wasn't the point. "Oh."
"Is that enough space for the plants, over there on the floor? I could stack some more boxes."
My gaze dropped toward the floor. Crates, boxes and baskets filled with twigs, leaves and seed pods---all the crackly stuff that might normally litter the ground---were stacked three and four high, with a ring of less-dusty concrete floor indicating a spot he'd just cleared.
David propped the door open for me with a lump of charred clay about the size of a paving brick. At least I'd thought it was a just a lump, until I took a second look at it and saw it seemed to have a kind of face.
"He guards the studio," David said. I think he was kidding. Probably.
I unloaded the truck, and he watched. And that was no different from any other customer. I was the landscaper; I handled the stock. Except it felt different from any other customer. His handshake lingered longer than your typical, polite how-do-you-do, and now I felt his eyes on me with something more than the idle curiosity I get from the average homeowner.
So once I apologized to the third corylus about its imminent fate, then wedged it into the spot that was the exact size it needed to be without an inch to spare, I wasn't surprised to turn around---not too slowly, and favoring my bad leg---and find him right there behind me. I shifted my weight to avoid a flare of pain, and that motion brought our faces even closer together---like maybe I was a hell of a lot bolder than I actually was. Like I swooped in for the kill on guys I'd just met all the time.
I caught a hint of a smile---not the knowing smile this time, but something more pure, more like happiness. And David leaned in too and closed the rest of the distance.
Our lips brushed, and mostly I held still, shocked because this closeness could very well have been the first good thing the accident had ever brought me---and I didn't want to ruin it by taking too much notice.
But then David's earth-scented fingertips grazed my jaw, and his touch reassured me, somewhat, that maybe I was allowed to notice. Maybe he wanted me to notice.
One kiss ended, and David's mouth hovered there as if the first brush of lips had just been a test to see how the water might be---and maybe he hadn't quite decided whether or not he wanted to jump in.
No. It couldn't just end. Not now, not after that first awkwardness was past. I wasn't willing to let him back away now; that would be worse then having never kissed at all. I cupped the back of head and drew my fingers through his hair---not quite short, not quite long, and damp with sweat from the heat of the kiln.
I chanced a look at him. He'd been doing the same at me, and we both smiled, good smiles that faded only to fall into another kiss. A deep kiss. Not all guys are into kissing---but he was. And he was good at it. Confident.
When we came up for air David asked, "What would you say to staying for dinner?" He toyed with my five o'clock shadow in a way that made it pretty clear what'd be on the menu for dessert.
"I, um..." I glanced toward the door.
"That is your last name on the side of the truck, isn't it? That means you come and go as you please. Right?"
"I wouldn't press my luck. Potosi and Sons? I'm the youngest Potosi."
"I see. We'll just have to say you hit some rocks when you put the hazel in. Really big rocks. In clay soil. Deep."
We were still right up against each other, me with my back to the corylus, him blocking my escape. He made no sign of moving. I raked my fingers through his damp hair again, and tucked a loosely curled strand behind his ear. The earlobe was scarred with a half-dozen old piercings, but now he wore no jewelry at all. He didn't need any, not with those eyes of his. They bored into mine with the unhurried intensity of someone who knew something would go down, it was just a matter of time---so he might as well savor the dance. Me? I might've been confident like that when I was twenty-seven, but not now. Not after nearly a year in a wheelchair.
He dragged his fingertips down the swell of my pecs, and lingered over my six-pack through my T-shirt. After the wreck I'd needed to totally change my workout, but Eloise, my physical therapist, was gung ho for anything that would distract me long enough to keep me from "accidentally" rolling my chair out onto the four-lane during rush hour. David said, "What can I do to convince you?"
I glanced toward the door again.
"You have a boyfriend," he suggested, with mock disappointment that wasn't quite mocking.
"No."
"A girlfriend."
"Heck, no. I'm not seeing anyone."
"And so...?" He pulled back finally, and I could hardly keep holding on to him. He crossed his arms over his chest, looked me up and down, and raised an eyebrow.
I scratched my forehead, fully aware that I probably looked like a big clod with an IQ of about ten. "Maybe we could go somewhere."
"You mean...a date?" He seemed to find my discomfiture amusing, at least.
"Sure, yeah. A date." What else could I say? I was supposed to be the big, strapping hired help. I couldn't very well tell him I was scared of his house.
He nodded slowly, and considered me. "All right, Anthony Potosi. I'll be done feeding this firing tonight. Pick me up at seven."
Sal and Chip both turned to me grinning like a couple of idiots when I got back to the greenhouse, Sal with his feet on Dad's old desk, as usual, Chip protecting a cup of burnt-down coffee between his hands, as usual. For a second I thought they knew---that they'd seen it all over my face, I'd had some stranger's tongue in my mouth. That I could've had more if I hadn't taken things down a notch.
"There's no one there, the guy told his date," Chip said in a put-on voice. "I'll just get out of the car and show you...."
Sal clamped his mouth shut tight.
Chip curled his fingers into a hook, made a ridiculous face, and clawed at me. Cold coffee spattered the floor like blood drops. Sal burst into laughter with all the finesse of a balloon with the air spluttering out of it.
They both laughed, not quite with me, not quite at me, but more or less with each other. I joined in, mostly with relief that "met a guy" and all the baggage it implied hadn't appeared on my forehead in big, glowing letters.
"It's different now," I said, when the ha-has died down to a few scattered snickers. "It's cleaned up." Neither one of them would have thought much of the gardens---too wild, too unstructured, too close to nature. Chip liked his evergreens so manicured they looked as if they'd popped out of a mold, and Sal dismissed anything homeowners put in themselves, unless they'd won some kind of Garden Club award. "There's a red door on the porch."
"I can still see it." Sal's mouth convulsed a few times, and a fresh round of laughter erupted. "The look on your face. You turned white, swear to God, white as a sheet, and you ran all the way back to Grandpa Tito's."
"When you were putting in the corylus," Chip asked, "you didn't notice anything hanging off the doorknob...did you?"
They laughed some more.
"Yeah, right. A bloody hook. Ha, ha, ha." I glanced at the clock. It was after five. "I'm gonna go."
Chip stood up with his coffee. "Wait a minute, wait a minute. That's it? You work on the Hook House and that's all you're gonna tell us? There's a red door? Come on, bro, spill. Who owns the place? Why'd they want hazelnut---they some kinda nature freak who wants to wake up to deer in the backyard, or what?"
Chip and Sal had both stopped laughing at me---finally---and were watching me with an expectancy that made me leery, as if David were my secret and I needed to protect him...from what? Their teasing? I hardly thought he'd care.
Maybe it was me that needed protecting.
I chose my words carefully, so they wouldn't invite any more probing---because if I explained that David had bought the corylus just to fire his wood kiln, I'd never hear the end of it. "An artist lives there. Native plants---wildflowers, echinacea, bee balm."
My brothers both waved my description off, literally (hey, we're Italian) and Chip said, "All those years of neglect, that's probably all that can grow there." Sal added, "Clay soil," like that explained everything.
I'd deflected their curiosity---for now.
I pulled up in front of the Hook House at five to seven---after driving up and down County Trunk T for fifteen minutes---and wondered if I should have brought something. Flowers, maybe. Wine. If I should've dressed up my black slacks and white shirt with a sportcoat, or even a tie. If I should have shaved. Even though David seemed to like the stubble.
I managed to knock on the red door before I psyched myself out completely, and David answered in faded black jeans and a vintage-looking button up shirt with some kind of dark paisley pattern, murky, so you could hardly see it. His dark hair was damp, and hung in finger-combed waves. The brightest thing on him was his eyes---and his smile.
When I suggested Leoni's, an out-of-the-way Italian restaurant outside Harrisburg, David was game. If we'd gone all the way into the city, chances were I'd be expected to stop for a drink afterward. And where there's drinking---at least if you're talking about a gay bar, and not one of those neighborhood sports bars where the farmers spend whatever's leftover on their subsidy checks---there's dancing. Needless to say, I wasn't much for clubbing anymore.
Still, it hadn't occurred to me until we were sitting down at the table with its white linens and flickering candle that I'd never gone there with a date, only family.
David watched me like he'd known what was going through my head before I did. I'd never thought getting back in the saddle would be so hard. Walking---that had been the big hurdle. Or so I'd thought.
We made some painful small talk. Painful for me, anyway, because I was so damn nervous I hardly knew what to say. I ordered rigatoni with shrimp alfredo---less likely to stain my white shirt than marinara---and David got linguini with artichoke, hold the prosciutto. "But that's the best part," I told him.
"Vegetarian," he said simply.
I probably looked at him like he'd just said, "Martian."
"I hope that doesn't mean we can't be seen together."
I laughed. It didn't sound too nervous, I hoped. "No, that's great. I couldn't do it, myself. How come?"
"I make it a point not to climb on the animal rights soap box during dinner."
"Oh."
A long, awkward pause followed. He sipped his house red. I took a bigger drink from mine than I'd planned to. "I think you'd get it," he said, "given that you talk to plants."
I felt my cheeks flush, and took another gulp of wine to cover my face.
"You didn't know you were doing it out loud?"
"I didn't know anyone was paying attention."
He ran his fingertip over the rim of his glass and watched me with those knowing eyes of his, and the way my body reacted to that single look, he might as well have been sliding that finger down the waistband of my slacks. "How could I have been watching anything else?"
We ate---he even ate sexy, catching the sauce on his lower lip with a small dart of his tongue---and I stopped at one more glass of wine since I was driving, while he had a couple more. If I'd found David flirtatious before, once he had a few drinks in him, he stared at the top button of my shirt like he was ready to strip me down and do me right there on the starched white tablecloth.
Or the car. Something that started as a nuzzle against my raspy jawline turned into a kiss, that turned into a kiss with tongue...that turned into an exploration of which side I dressed to.
I shifted back into park since I didn't trust my leg to keep my foot on the brake, not with David's sculptor's hands working magic on my cock. Unfortunately, that motion broke the kiss.
We were both breathing hard. David's hand stilled, though it lingered there in my lap like it didn't need much encouragement to get busy again. "We've had our date. Now will you come home with me?"
"I wasn't planning on making you walk back." Maybe not the smoothest line, but better than the nervous laugh that seemed ready to burst out any moment.
He leaned back in his seat and watched me---and I could barely remember how to drive. I managed somehow, though we spent most of the way back in silence, me with my eyes on the road, David with his eyes on me. He climbed out to open the gate, and I pulled up the short drive to his house. The Hook House.
He came around to the driver's side and opened it while I sat and stared at the front door. It looked black in the moonlight, not red.
"You want to tell me what's bothering you?"
I cut the engine, and that stilted ha-ha finally did bubble up. "It's nothing."
"You kiss like a drowning man, I brush up against you and you get hard---and yet you don't want to come in. That's something."
I steered my story a little closer to the truth. "It's not you."
He stood there framed by my open car door and watched me. I remembered that look from the restaurant. From when I unloaded the corylus. Like he was patient enough to watch me for as long as it took. I looked at the black door again, and farther, past the edge of the wraparound porch to the grounds beyond.
"It's this place. That's all."
David glanced back at the house, and the mood palpably lightened. "It's intense. You feel it too?"
You'd have to be dead not to feel it. I decided that would be a bad choice of words, and I nodded instead.
"It stood vacant for a few years. Good thing the roof held. Otherwise it might've been lost---and that would've been a shame, with its character and its history. You grew up around here, didn't you?"
I nodded again.
"Bob at the hardware store tells me the kids used to say it was haunted."
I wished I could force a laugh then, nervous or not, but all I could do was stare at that black door.
David leaned into the car and put his mouth to my ear. "The only scary thing about it is the flocked velvet wallpaper in the stairwell. I promise."
I got out of the car. I felt vulnerable out there in the open, outside town where there weren't any streetlights to veil the night sky, and so many stars shone from the gaps in the canopy they looked like spilled vermiculite.
Who knows what I expected to be inside that house. When we were kids I'd stood on Sal's interlaced fingers and tried to sneak a look, but all I ever saw were shadowy outlines of built-in cupboards, and mostly my own reflection looking back at me. Current reality was anticlimactic. The Hook House was just a house---a strange old house filled with age-darkened woodwork and faded wallpaper, with scarred wood floors and light fixtures that might or might not be up to code---but still nothing more than a house.
The yard, though....
"What about the headstones?" I said.
David smiled---not that secret-knowledge smile, but the genuine one that lit up like the stars. "So this old place really was a local legend."
"To ten-year-olds," I said. I guess I sounded casual.
He took me by the hand, as if holding hands was the most natural thing in the world, and walked me through an impressive set of burled oak pocket doors into a cramped sitting room where the sofa and end chairs didn't match, and an old steamer trunk doubled as a coffee table. "Sit."
I eased into the sofa. It was too low for my taste---hard to stand up from---but it smelled like the house, like it had history. Not like mine, a futon on a mock-Ikea frame.
My first furniture had been more like David's---hand-me-downs from my Aunt Barb, Salvation Army finds. It had all gone back to the thrift store after the crash, when the doctors said I'd probably be in the chair for the rest of my life. When Chip put the ramp in his split-level and I moved in with him and his wife.
David pressed a glass of red wine into my hand without asking if I wanted it or not. It was full to the brim---and if I drank it, I'd probably want another one---and then I'd probably be in no shape to drive. I supposed that was the point. I took a swallow. It seemed stronger than the house red at Leoni's, more character. I took a bigger swallow.
In that moment when my glass was tipped back, David dropped a few sheets of newsprint on top of the steamer trunk. They slid together with a dry rustle. "What's this?"
"Rubbings."
The burial plot. Some part of me wanted to panic, to be the white-faced kid again who'd run all the way back to his grandfather's apartment. But David was sitting down next to me---right next to me, thighs touching---and that old fear seemed small now, insignificant. Something that had happened to another person, in another life. Maybe not even a real life. Something I'd seen on TV. In fact, I was more worried about spilling my wine on him than of some boogey-man rising up out of the grave.
"Look at this." David ran his fingers along the one of the rubbings. I looked, mostly, though I was more interested in the shape of his strong fingers. "I thought it was a crack, but I looked at it some more, and now I think it might have been a vine. It's too stylized to be random."
I leafed through the paper. The headstones had been wearing away for years, but I could make out an 1822 on one rubbing, the name Henry on another.
"You're fine with it," I said. "You moved in here, climbed into bed, and didn't give it a second thought."
"What's that?" His eyes were heavy-lidded with wine. And, of course, he was smiling---a lazy, seductive smile.
"That there were people buried a dozen yards away from the house."
"Do I look bothered?"
No, he looked hot. And he was eyeing my neck like he wanted to see how it tasted. He reached over and undid my top button, the one he'd been so fascinated by in the restaurant, and exposed some chest hair. Touched the hairs with his fingertip.
"My first night here, I was so tickled the papers were signed that I drank two bottles of champagne and crashed in my sleeping bag. I'd bid on this house with no actual hope of getting a mortgage, so even if I'd known about it at the time, the old family plot wouldn't have been the first thing on my mind."
"You didn't know?"
"The yard was four feet deep with weeds. And the realtor never mentioned it. Good thing. I probably would've bid more than I could afford if I'd known about it. Then the bank would've turned me down...and I'd still be living in Harrisburg, teaching bored retirees to throw pots."
David kissed me then, and it felt different then our tentative exploration in the kiln shed---had that really been only earlier that day?---and the intense, breathless groping in the car outside the restaurant. This was the slow, sure press of lips and tongue that would end with us in bed.
He broke the kiss and said, "I think we'd be more comfortable upstairs," watching my eyes all the while. I nodded, and he smiled again---and it struck me as crazy that I could bring out that gorgeous smile on him just by saying yes. "If you squint hard," he said, "the wallpaper doesn't leap out at you quite so much."
He stood and pulled his shirt off, and let it fall between the arm of the sofa and a dusty ottoman. He was lean, slimmer than me, graceful. Older too, maybe ten or twelve years, judging by the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, and the various occupations and wanderings he'd mentioned during dinner.
I spotted a dark stripe on his forearm and caught his hand to get a better look at it. The skin was taut and shiny, scar tissue, gently puckered around the perimeter of the wound. "A kiln got the better of me," he said. "Occupational hazard."
He shifted his grip and pulled me up from the couch. It saved me from having to lever myself out---and it also made me wonder if I even needed to mention the car accident at all, since he'd been watching me so hard whenever I was in range that he'd undoubtedly noticed the limp. He probably wondered. But I didn't feel like talking about it, not just then, when the only thing I cared about was stripping off the rest of his clothes, and feeling his mouth on me again.
The wallpaper really was as bad as David had said, like a vineyard on acid had exploded onto the wall, big grapes, small grapes, leaves and curling fronds spiraling through an endless velvet trellis that was furry like mold. But I kept my eyes on his back, the gentle curve of his spine, the concavity of the dimples at his lower back that just begged me to press my thumbs in as I...well, I figured I probably shouldn't get ahead of myself. There was still the matter of negotiating who'd get to do what.
His bedroom was a hodgepodge of mismatched furniture, just like the downstairs. The room was narrow, with high walls and elaborate crown molding. He'd stripped the wallpaper from the walls but never done anything with the plaster beneath. It looked raw and unfinished at first, until I realized the patina of age had created its own pattern, gentle whorls of tan and cream.
David turned and caught me by the shirt. "I barely made it through dinner. I could hardly wait to get a better look at you." I undid my cuffs, and he pulled the shirt over my head.
The only marks the accident had left me with were the hatchmarks on my upper arm where, as far as we could figure, the rearview mirror shattered on me. All the other damage had been internal. It always seemed like my femur getting ripped from its socket should have left a permanent scar, but it hadn't. I was young. My parts stayed where they were supposed to when they put me back together again without any pins, so no incisions. And my pelvis, broken in three places? You'd never know to look at it now. Not unless you watched me try to walk.
Once my shirt was off, David went for my chest hair again, fanning his fingertips so he could span my chest with his artist's hands. "Very nice."
I didn't know how to reply to that, so I unbuckled my belt. David knocked my hands out of the way so he could do it for me. As he sank to his knees, he murmured, "Yes."
Standing was okay in small doses. I shifted my weight to my good leg---which gave me trouble now from favoring the bad one, but I could ignore it for a good few minutes---took a wide stance, and sank my fingers into his hair.
My pants fell and caught on the swells of my calves. David pushed my boxers down around my thighs. I sucked air so hard when he took me into his mouth I went lightheaded and giddy.
I realized how hard I was holding his head and I let up some. He didn't seem to mind one way or the other. My cock was swelling fast in the wet heat of his mouth. He worked it with his tongue, and as it stiffened, his lips. I stared at the wall mostly, the aged plaster, until I couldn't bear not seeing him there, kneeling for me, getting me off---and then I chanced a look. A brief one. Because I was still way too leery of my recent good fortune to blatantly enjoy myself.
Once I was hard, good and hard, I felt David straining to swallow me down, and the sound of my cock filling his warm, wet mouth, over and over, sent everything I had rushing down toward my groin. I wanted to grab his head, fuck his pretty face, but I stood there instead like a statue and let David do all the work. I was graceless now, a big, awkward lump like the doorstop in his studio---but he saw something in me he liked, and that would need to be enough.
The air in the room felt cool as it licked at my wet cock when David pulled off. He looked up at me with those eyes, gave my cock a deliberate stroke, and said, "I'm dying to feel this inside me."
Again---what could I say? I hadn't even dared to hope as much. I managed to nod.
He stood, rubbing up against me the whole motion, and planted another slow, easy kiss on me with the mouth that was hot and musky from sucking me off. He looped his arms around my shoulders, pressed his forehead to mine, and said, "What's the best way?"
And that was the only nod he gave to my injury.
"Lay on your side," I told him. I'd always wondered how I would handle it, that first time in my new, broken and fused body, and there it was. No big deal, it turned out. All the angst, all the mental rehearsal of what to say, how to say it, and how to deal with it when whoever I was with---a faceless person, always---decided it was too much trouble, pulled on his pants, and left.
But not David. He'd been eating me up with his eyes all night, and he didn't seem like the type to give up easily. He slipped over the footboard and stretched an arm toward the nightstand, where he pulled out a condom and tossed it toward me. It fell with a small pat on the candlewicked blanket. He set a bottle of silicone lube next to the reading lamp. "I'm negative---but we can compare pedigrees later."
I hadn't been tested lately, not that I'd needed to be. When your body's shattered, sex isn't really a priority.
He pushed off his jeans while I rolled on the condom. It didn't seem like the best idea to launch over the footboard like he had, so I rounded it, moving slow, taking my time, and climbed into bed behind him. What I really wanted to do was jam myself in there, do the deed without drawing it out any longer than I had to---because I wanted it so much, it seemed like I'd manage to screw it all up somehow. But there he was, watching me over his shoulder, waiting for me to fit my body against his, and the look in his eyes was complicated. Like maybe he knew I was busy thinking: why now, why me...or at least he could guess.
I touched him. The rise of his hipbone, the long, lean stretch of his thigh. I stroked his body, up and down, as far as I could reach, and his cock went from "interested" to rock hard as the side of my hand glanced over it in passing.
David arched his back and fit his ass against my stiff cock. He nestled my hard-on between his cheeks so I could hold him close and stroke him, and I decided that if I'd jumped right into the sex, I would've missed this. And this was what it was all about. Connecting.
He twisted his shoulder back, slipped his upper arm behind my neck, and pulled me into a loose, wet kiss that we both had to strain to make. His hair was trapped between my cheek and the pillow. It smelled like shampoo, and beneath that, faintly, of woodsmoke.
He hooked his foot behind my ankle and tangled our legs, too. We were woven together, him and me, and he kept arching against me as we kissed, his body making promises of how amazing it would feel....
"Fuck me." He whispered the words against my lips. "Please."
I felt a dull twinge in my pelvis when I twisted to grab the lube, but nothing too alarming, nothing more than I might have felt digging the TV remote out from between the futon frame and the wall. The cool gel felt strange in my hand, an old memory of something I used to know about, but so long ago that it was unfamiliar territory now.
I kissed David's shoulder. He was waiting with the covers balled in his fist in anticipation, and his upper knee bent. He shuddered as I stroked the lube over his ass, and I did it again, taking my time, watching his hand twist the blanket while I stroked him. I slipped a finger inside and his breathing went ragged.
"Kiss my neck," he gasped. "Your stubble's so hot---I want to feel it scraping me when you sink that big dick in."
"My God, you're beautiful." It slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it, but it only got him more fired up. He was squirming with the need to be fucked...no, for me to fuck him. And his desire, his need, was powerful enough to pick me up and carry me right along with him. There was the pressure, the tightness, the give as I sank in---and we were moaning, both of us moaning because this was it, the thing we'd been longing for. This merging. This connection.
He worked it at first, that lithe body of his moving against mine, flexing and grinding, so hot and so tight I was worried I might not last as long as it would take to satisfy him. I cupped my hand over his hard cock, and he wrapped his hand around mine and wove our fingers together so we were both stroking him off while he fucked himself on my cock.
I was so far gone in him, everything about him from the spill of dark hair across the pillow, to the girlishly pretty, long-lashed eyes, to the work-roughened hands and the kiln-scarred arms, that I forgot myself...and before I realized it, I was moving too. Rocking into him. Fucking him.
His lower arm, what he could move of it, started clawing at the blankets then, and he squeezed my fingers hard as we stroked his hard cock together. His back arched again and he went taut everywhere, and before he finished his climb---but just barely---I remembered how he'd gotten off on my five o'clock shadow, and I bent my head to the crook of his neck, fixed my mouth on his salty, hot skin, and sucked.
His whole body thrummed when he came.
I felt it, in my thighs where they meshed with his, in my chest where his back, sweat-slicked, rubbed against it. In my cock, where he bucked against me, and made wordless sounds of pleasure deep in his throat, laced with helpless, desperate breathing. And I stilled myself and ate up every last bit of what I'd done for him. I think I was surprised then, to know that I could still make someone feel those things. I wasn't as broken as I'd thought.
I clasped David to my chest when I came, and I sighed a deep sigh into his hair. The grinding slowed, and stilled. And then I simply held him.
I slept, a deep and dreamless three-glasses-of-wine sleep, and woke grudgingly to daylight peeking through yellowed lace curtains, and the smell of strong coffee. My body protested like I'd known it would. David's bed was softer than mine, and his pillows more worn and flattened. Neck---hurt. Lower back---hurt. Hips---hurt, both of them. Not the icepick sensation I had when I'd first hauled myself from the wheelchair to the walker, but an intense soreness that needed some meds to take the edge off.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and everything throbbed. I definitely needed something. At least some Tylenol.
I found a cramped bathroom with a clawfoot tub down the hall. Stepping over the edge of the tub might not be pretty, so I washed up by the sink instead. There I was in the mirror, bleary and dark with stubble, me---and I'd slept all night in the Hook House. Only it didn't feel like the Hook House at all. It was David's house.
I took the stairs slowly, one by one, and followed the smell of coffee into the kitchen. Still no David, but there was a pot of French-press coffee with a ratty towel wrapped around it to keep it warm. I peeked in the fridge---no milk---so I poured myself a cup and drank it black. It was strong enough to clear my sinuses. I took a deep breath, and I wondered when the last time had been that I'd felt so alive.
The Hook House, David's house, was probably fascinating. But as I poked into the narrow rooms and alcoves, all the books and papers and antiquey bric-a-brac just registered as "David's stuff," and mostly what I noticed was that he wasn't there.
The front door was definitely red in the newly-risen sun. Mist hung over the meadow, waiting for that sun to burn it away. I checked the kiln shed first---no David---and then I made my way around the property to the only other place I was familiar with---the burial plot.
He'd spread a clay-spattered canvas tarp over the wet grass like he was having a picnic. He lay on his back with one hand tucked behind his head and his hair fanned out on the canvas. He was wearing the same clothes he'd worn the night before, except now the shirt was buttoned wrong, and it had ridden up to tease me with a glimpse of his navel. A cup of thick black coffee, loosely gripped in his free hand, balanced on his chest.
I approached him and looked around. I recognized a bowed oak from my childhood---and could practically see a twelve-year-old Chip lying sprawled at the roots while Sal and I both wondered if he'd broken his neck---and whether we'd get the belt for it. But the shoulder-high weeds were long gone, and now the ground below it was blanketed in low-growing thyme that threaded through the rocks.
If I squinted, the house looked like the Hook House. Kind of. But there were curtains. And fresh paint. And even squinting couldn't make it look as dilapidated as it had been when I was a boy.
David said, "I suppose you're going to tell me you can't let me worship every inch of your body with my tongue right now because you have to work today."
"I do."
He gave a mock-sigh. "I can see I need to educate you about the perks of being self-employed." David patted the tarp. "Sit with me for a minute, then."
I knelt, gingerly. "Why here?"
He wedged an elbow beneath himself and sat up only enough to have a sip of coffee. "You seemed so put off about the graves last night, I wanted you to see the side yard like this." He stared out over the meadow like he was looking into eternity. "Some things aren't nearly as scary as we think they are."
A chill raced down my spine, but I wasn't sure I'd call it fear. It felt more like excitement. I blurted out, "I was in an accident."
"I know."
What? Time skittered to a stop for a moment while I tried to make sense of what he'd just said. "What do you mean? How could you know?"
He kept on gazing out at the dissipating mist, and he smiled a smile that was mostly sad. "Lie down with me, Anthony."
I spread myself out, and he let the half-full coffee cup fall into the grass and empty itself while he rested his cheek against my chest. He must've heard my heart pounding against my ribcage, because he added, "Don't worry. It's not any scarier than the headstones."
"How old are you?" he asked me.
"Twenty-nine."
I felt him smile against my chest. I suppose it could have meant anything. "That's how old I was when I started seeing Marcus. I used to say I wasted ten years of my life on him---but I suppose I'd be a different person today if he'd never happened to me. He was a junkie."
He paused for a moment to allow my dismay, which he must have sensed, even though he wasn't looking at my face. "And that's why I wanted you to know---I have been tested. I am clean. Not just HIV, but hepatitis, and who knows what else. Probably the only reason is because Marcus couldn't really...perform." Another long pause, but now it seemed to be more about him, trying to talk as if he were telling me a story about someone else, a fictional person who was anyone but him. Except he couldn't quite pull it off. His voice had a catch in it that made it sound like he'd had to scrape out the bottom of his heart to find the right words. "I suppose I could sit and wonder why I'd stay with someone like that for as long as I did, and I'm sure there are plenty of pat answers."
"You wanted to fix him."
"Did I? That's what all of my friends said, the ones who were still talking to me, anyway. It didn't really resonate with me. I think it was something deeper."
My gaze wandered over the old, worn headstones as he spoke, and it lit on something---a small face, which at first I took to be a fancy piece of statuary that had broken away from the stone. But the headstones were all plain slabs, hardly ornamented, and then only with rudimentary crosses, or wavy lines that might be either vines or cracks.
"The thing was, I understood Marcus---he was in pain. I mean, we all are, to one extent or another. I think you know a little something about that."
One I spotted that initial face, soon others came clear, dotted through the grass like pale mushrooms that had sprung up all around us in the early morning mist. Small ceramic forms, people.
"I almost left him more times than I could count. Sometimes he'd beg me to stay, and sometimes he'd go quiet, like he knew he didn't deserve to be with anyone---he was too selfish---and those were the worst. The silences. I could fill them in with everything I felt guilty about, everything I would have done differently, given the chance. They reeled me back in. Every time."
Each of them was unique, and yet they were somehow alike. All male, all dark-haired, and all strangely graceful in their raw, barely finished beauty. Self-portraits. Their expressions were as enigmatic as David's smiles.
"I lived on Baker Street, above the cell phone store that used to be a bridal shop," he said. I shuddered at the sound of the words before their meaning even sank in. "We lived there, I should say. When Marcus bothered to come home, when he didn't pass out on the floor of the flophouse of whoever he was shooting up with that week. And that morning---the last morning---wasn't one of the silences. It was one of our fights."
Baker Street. Harrisburg. Dad and me in the van, him in the driver's seat, at the intersection of Baker and Main, where we'd just written up an estimate for a boxwood edging. Baker is at the top of an incline, and it's a blind stop.
"When we fought," David said, "we fought gloriously. That morning we were on the sidewalk by the mailbox, and everyone up and down the whole damn street got a front row seat look into our tawdry little lives. I was glad, you know? Because he'd been shooting under his tongue---his tongue---and he was scared he'd messed something up. And I was livid. I actually hoped he had. It would've served him right."
We were sitting at that stop sign. Dad's cell phone rang. The office's ringtone. I don't know why he answered---it could have waited.
"So there we were, Marcus and me, howling at the top of our lungs, both of us hurting---he's hurt, I'm hurt, everyone's in pain, the world is made of pain---and I look up through my melodramatic tears, and suddenly---"
It was Christopher---Chip. He'd made the phone call that Dad answered when he rolled through the stop, and the SUV coming up the hill T-boned us going forty-five in a twenty-five zone.
"I'd never heard anything like it. Or seen anything like it, but it was the squealing metal crunch I can't get out of my head---and it was so loud I swear I could feel it reverberating up my body through the soles of my feet."
"Jesus Christ." My voice was thick.
"I thought you were dead, you know. I didn't see how anyone could get hit that hard and survive. The sick part? Once the initial stunned silence wore off, Marcus went right on wailing about himself and his problems. His pathetic fucking self-inflicted problems. Right there---that's where my sympathy switched off. That was the moment I took my life back. How long ago was that---two years?"
"Two and a half."
"Right. I'd just turned forty. Forty years old, getting screamed at by my junkie boyfriend. And it took that...seeing the paramedics prying the collapsed door off with the Jaws of Life, then hauling you out of there head-to-toe bloody...to shake me up enough, get me far enough outside of myself, to see how fucked up it was that I was still with Marcus."
It seemed like I should have something to say to that, but I was too stunned. The headstones? I had no idea why I'd ever thought they were scary. Hearing my accident described by the guy I'd just slept with---that made the coffee I'd swallowed earlier do flip-flops in my stomach.
David snugged up against me tighter and dragged his fingertip through a whorl in my chest hair. "So when I was calling around to see if anyone had hazel in stock, and I saw the Potosi and Sons ad in the yellow pages...that logo...it was like I was looking at the side of your truck all over again." He sighed. "Anyway, after I got over the shock of it, I decided it was time. That I could handle knowing what had happened.
"I didn't recognize you when you got out of the van, seeing as how you weren't covered in your own blood. But I saw how you walked and put two and two together."
I supposed that seeing me up and walking might've made the story seem to have a happier ending than it actually did. "My dad died."
We were both silent for a long moment, while the figurines in the grass looked on with their unreadable expressions.
David said, "He was talking when they pulled him out of the van. He was calling out for you."
"Two days later, he threw a blood clot in the hospital. A massive stroke killed him. I was still out of it---I didn't get a chance to say goodbye."
• • •
I stopped home to shower and change, and I considered shaving---but instead I stood and looked in the mirror, and ran my hand over my whiskers. I dunno what this Marcus guy had looked like, but I imagined him as a wimpy, skinny, wasted thing that couldn't even get it up when his gorgeous lover wanted a real man to hold on to, and I decided to limit my shaving to a little cleanup around the neck. I might be proud, but I wasn't above using body hair to draw attention away from my injury.
Especially if I wasn't sure which of those things David was actually drawn to.
As I shaved, I considered: What if all the pawing at my chest hair and my big dick were incidental, and what he'd really wanted was to sample me after my brush with my own mortality, just to see what it tasted like? He wasn't morbid, exactly. But the boundary between life and death did seem to mesmerize him.
And what if all that stuff I'd noticed about him---artsy, graceful, devastating eyes---what if that was just a bunch of window-dressing too? What if what I was really after was his impulse to find broken things and throw himself into fixing them?
Would that really be so bad?
What capped it all was that he'd seen my father. Calling out for me---that's how David had put it. Yeah, it gave me the willies, and it made my eyes sting every time I thought about it, but it was the closest I'd ever come to introducing someone new to Dad.
When I got to the office at ten after eight, Sal's and Chip's trucks were both sitting in the lot. My back, hip and pelvis all throbbed as I walked through the door, but I was still busy turning around the David puzzle in my head, so I could ignore it. "Wouldjda look at what the cat dragged in," Sal called out.
Today they shared Dad's L-shaped desk, each of them on their own rolling office chair---and they were so in synch I'd swear they were choreographed. "Whatsa matter, Anthony," Chip said, "your shaver broke or something?"
I pulled my clipboard from a slot in the wall. They each had half of dad's old desk, and I had a clipboard. I preferred it, actually. It allowed me to do my writing in the greenhouses. In peace.
"That's a beard," Sal ventured, "ain't it? You're growing a beard."
"Christ," said Chip, "you're too young for a beard."
"He looks like Uncle Al, don't he?"
"Yeah, but come on, he's just a kid."
"It's a gay thing," Sal decided, "right? Some of them gays like the beards."
Chip looked at me as if Sal had just told him "them gays" wore underwear on their heads. "Yeah?"
I turned, ignored a red-hot twinge that shot down the back of my bad leg, and limped toward the door to Greenhouse Two.
"Is that it?" Chip called after me, like he genuinely wanted to know.
"And by the way," Sal added, "you gonna turn in your bill for the Hook House anytime this year? I gotta close out the week tonight."
I paused with my hand on the door latch. A dozen images of David flashed through my mind like a deck of cards being shuffled.
"Cripes," Chip said, "I almost forgot. That guy called again."
That guy. I squeezed the door latch so hard I was surprised it didn't come off in my hand.
"What," Sal asked him, "the Hook House guy? Get outta here."
"Yeah, get this. Now he's looking for yarrow. I say we got pink, and we got yellow. He says he wants white."
"White? You mean like the weeds that grow in the ditch?"
"And he was asking for you, Anthony. So what's the deal, he's a gay too? What are the chances?"
About one in ten, depending on who you ask. I ignored Chip and dragged my lame leg out to the warm, moist, earth-scented sanctuary of the greenhouse. I was getting my daily dose of mister to the face when Sal came in behind me. He never followed me into the greenhouses. They made his hair frizzy---and then what would happen if a "babe" came in looking for something to dethatch her lawn and found him all frizzy-headed?
Sal. In that fateful conversation when I'd had to explain why, exactly, I was watching Will and Grace, because Chip thought the show was for "fags," and I shot back, "Then maybe I am one, you think of that?" Sal had just smiled his "I think my hair looks good today" smile with the assurance that with his kid brother out of the running, there were more "babes" left for him.
He took a look around the greenhouse as if he'd just fallen down the other side of the looking glass, and he kept his hair well away from the sprayer. "So maybe we should call it the Hook-Up house now, huh?"
I tried not to smile without much success. I acted very interested in dead-heading a chrysanthemum instead.
"Why you being so mysterious about it? You brought guys around before."
I shrugged.
"The paperwork..." he said. "Give your buddy a freebie if you want." I had the suspicion that Lorretta Barnett's immaculate rose arbor was just that sort of transaction. "It ain't like the hazel would've lasted the winter, anyhow."
"Thanks." I maybe sounded more sarcastic than I'd mean to.
The misters shut off on their timer, and Sal eyed one suspiciously. "For someone who just got his dick polished, you don't seem too happy. I do something to piss you off?"
I stared hard at the chrysanthemum, but there weren't any answers there, tucked between the leaves. It was impossible to have a private thought in my family without someone calling you out over it. "You and Chip trying to get me to quit?"
Sal mouthed the word "what?" to himself and crossed his arms. He wasn't quite as burly as me, but he was still a big guy---and he puffed up when he was getting ready for a fight. "You're paranoid."
"Really."
"You think Chip and me got nothing better to do than scheme against you when you're on a job?"
Yes. I crossed my arms so I was bigger than Sal, and we stared at each other through the trailing fronds from the hanging Boston fern. "He told me yesterday I should let you two buy me out."
"It's news to me." He looked sincere...and he'd never been a very good liar. "When was this?"
"When we were loading the truck."
"What, the yew? Only thing he told me about that was he thought you were gonna drop it on him."
I'd thought the same thing. He'd read my mind? What I wouldn't have given to be an only child.
"And now," Sal went on, "today, you're limping so hard you can barely walk." He smirked. "But maybe you just overdid a few moves last night, huh?"
The sex had been easier on me than I'd even dared to hope. It was the yew that got me.
Sal picked up a begonia, frowned at it, and put it back. "Don't be a dickhead, Tony. He worries about you."
"Why?"
"That's what he does."
My family's shorthand for not being ready to delve any deeper. I knew why Chip worried about me. He was the one who'd had the special waterbed installed in what used to be his rec room. He was the one who'd found me pounding on that fucking ramp in a blind rage 'til I drove splinters into my knuckles. He'd even changed a bedpan or two.
And yet, with my conversation with David fresh in my mind, I realized I could go even deeper than that, to the moment before everything changed. When Chip called---he called, he was the one---and Dad answered.
If I'd said, "Dad didn't have to answer that phone," I knew damn well Sal would've understood exactly what I meant. Chip didn't have to carry that guilt around like a three-hundred-pound yew. But I think maybe he already knew that on some level---and if he didn't, or he wasn't ready to let go, he might get even more pissy with me for blaming the accident on Dad. So instead I said, "Tell Chip he'll be the first one to know if I get sick of the business."
Sal gave one of his classic shrugs, patted his hair to check the state of the frizz, and gave me an "it's all good" gesture. "Just make sure you bring this Hook House guy around sometime if it gets serious...and if he turns out to be a loser, tell him your brothers know where he lives."
Chip left me alone all day, though whether or not Sal talked to him, I'll never know. Maybe they communicated like octopuses by changing colors, or like hyacinth to bees, by releasing scent into the air. Or maybe Chip could just tell by the set of Sal's shoulders when he came out of the greenhouse that neither one of them was on my shit list at the moment.
By five o'clock my stubble had stubble, my socks were soaked through, and my right hip was on fire. Even so, I stopped by the old railroad tracks behind the water tower with my spade and did some digging, then swung back home for a shower and a change, and a couple of painkillers.
I drove by the Hook House a few times before I finally convinced myself that David could damn well hear me cruising up and down the road, so I might as well pull up the driveway. The gate was open.
He stood in the center of the kiln shed in jeans stiff with water and clay. He wore a stretched out black T-shirt with cutoff sleeves and a faded band logo on the front, and his arms were gray to the elbows with ash.
"You didn't call, did you?" he asked when I peeked in the screen door. "I really hate the phone. And I can't even hear it from out here."
My cell phone was usually off. The sound of a phone ringing in a moving vehicle is, understandably, not my favorite sound. I shook my head and let myself in.
"Good." His eyes went to the healthy clump of white yarrow I was cradling. "And you got my message, too."
"You know I had to outsource for this, right? We only had pink and yellow in stock."
"So your brother told me."
There was an empty spot on his work table in the exact size of the root ball. I set the yarrow down. "That costs extra."
His expression went naughty, and he shot me a look through his lashes. "How much extra?"
"I haven't really decided."
He wiped his hands on a rag that was stiff enough to stand up by itself, walked up to me with a sway to his hips, and draped his forearms over my shoulders. "Make sure you give me a nice...big...markup."
I reached around and ran my fingers over his low back while he kissed me. The room was hot. The smell of smoke lingered in the pores of the bricks, the walls were floor-to-ceiling combustibles---and in the middle of it all, David and I worked on kindling a little something of our own.
He clasped the back of my head so he could tilt it however he liked, then he ran his lips over my stubbled jaw, and gave a shiver. "Is this for me?"
"Uh-huh."
"Remember, I'm not used to anyone giving a damn about what I do or don't like. Attempts at impressing me send me into paroxysms of delight."
I suspected I wouldn't mind seeing a few of those. I let my hands drop so they covered his ass, and I held it two-handed, really working each cheek, getting a good feel for it. And letting him know that, bad hip or not, there was plenty more of what he'd had the previous night if he wanted it.
He steered my mouth back to his for another kiss, hungrier now, and his crotch bumped against mine. "You have a gorgeous cock," he murmured against my lower lip, and I was glad he was too close to see my eyes. It was embarrassing hearing something like that, pure torture---and yet it seemed to be exactly what I needed.
I worked his ass with my hands until I felt him start to strain against his jeans, and all the while our tongues met, probed, retreated.
He broke our kiss with a gasp, and pressed his forehead into my shoulder. "How bad will it be if I tell you I need to watch the kiln for another half hour or so?"
Half an hour? Heck, I would've waited for him until midnight. Or anytime after that. "I dunno," I said with mock severity. "The meter's running. You'd have to make it up to me."
David pulled back, ran his fingertips along my jawline, and caught his lower lip between his teeth in a grin. "Keep a tab...and don't go easy on me."
There was nothing to sit on, so I crossed my arms and leaned against the doorjamb while I watched him poke around the kiln. I loved the way he moved; I would've been content to enjoy the view all night. But then he rounded the kiln to check a gauge on the back, and I noticed a small face watching me watching David.
Just like in the yard. Suddenly I spotted another one, and another, tiny round clay faces, staring at me with their inscrutable eyes. A figurine even lurked among the baskets of corncobs and dried moss about a foot away from my head. At close range, the illusion of life fell away and intensified, both at the same time. The seams where the figure had been rolled together from slabs of pulled clay were apparent. They ran up each of his arms, and along either side of the torso. I could see small hatchmarks where the tools had dug into the clay to create the lips and eyelashes. And yet, up close, the figure was eerily expressive, as if it would shrink back into the recesses between the baskets the moment I looked away.
Except maybe he couldn't. A rusty four-inch nail pierced him, straight through the heart.
David had noticed me looking. He hadn't said anything, but he didn't pretend not to see, either. He left it for me to choose, whether to remark upon it, or not.
"So, these are self-portraits," I said.
"Usually." He glanced around the kiln shed, and his eyes lit on one, then another, then another. "Except...when they're not."
We both looked at the misshapen lump by the door. I got a chill, despite the hazel-smoked heat.
"You got any of Marcus?"
"Nope. No Marcus."
I glanced at the thing by the door again. Evidently that wasn't the ten-year junkie. Good. I was relieved. I didn't want him crashing my party---he'd had his chance, and he blew it. Hard enough to tell whether this thing between David and me was about hazel eyes and chest hair---or all the psychological stuff lurking beneath the surface---without throwing a heartbroken dope fiend into the mix.
David considered me for a moment, then admitted, "Maybe once upon a time there were a few Marcuses around. But I've found a good, old-fashioned ball peen hammer can be very therapeutic. And the driveway can always use the extra gravel."
I shivered again, and the hairs on my forearms stood on end. "And nothing happened?"
"Like what?"
"I dunno. To Marcus. When you smashed up his statues."
"They're not voodoo dolls," he said, "they're artwork," though I could tell he didn't mind me thinking me might have a little bit of magic in him. He turned and looked through a peephole in the kiln, then unhinged the top and propped it open a couple of inches with a small brick.
"So why fire 'em with hazel and yarrow? Don't tell me it's for the color---everything you make is white, gray or brown."
He glanced at me from the other side of the kiln through the wedge-shaped opening. Ashes floated up from the stove like gray snow. "I'll have you know I achieve a very respectable palette of browns. And gray."
He straightened up and finger-combed his damp hair back from his forehead. His back arched in a curve so graceful it made my breath catch. He said, "I hope you brought your paperwork."
I had a copy of my bloodwork results in my back pocket. "I did."
"Attentive, observant, and conscientious. I do believe I'll be putty in your hands, Mr. Potosi." He was smiling as he said it, but then he lifted the kiln lid another inch and peeked in, and his smile evaporated. "Damn."
I eased up behind him. "What?"
"My favorite piece didn't make it."
I hadn't realized ceramics were so volatile. "What do you mean---it turned out the wrong color brown?"
David propped the lid with a bigger brick. "Sometimes pieces crack when you fire them. Could be an air bubble, or maybe you didn't let it dry thoroughly enough, or maybe there's an impurity in the clay."
He stepped aside, and right there, on the top shelf, I saw a figure buried in ash. Its left leg was beside it.
I closed my eyes and pretended I didn't know what it was like to have my leg ripped straight out of its socket, then I blinked ash out of my eyes and looked again.
It wasn't one of those David figures. It was too bulky, too broad across the shoulders, and the hair was too short. I could see that even through the blanket of ash.
"Is that...?"
David hunched beside me and squinted in. He looked from the figure to me. "Oh."
"What do you mean, 'Oh'? Is that me, or isn't it?"
He stared at the kiln an awfully long time to be working on a yes or no answer.
"Well?"
He shook his head and said, "It can't be. I loaded that kiln before I even met you. It takes three days to fire and another day to cool. I'd made the greenware last week. I like to make sure they're really dry when I fire them. I lose less of them that way."
I hunkered down awkwardly and looked again at the single-legged guy. Well, technically he still had two legs. One of them just wasn't attached. It was ceramic, nothing more. A guy made of rolled slabs of scored-together clay. Heck, it was even covered with a layer of ash. I must have been projecting. It wasn't me. It was just a figure.
Except there was something about the way the right hip was joined, a little hitch in it, that looked like I'd stood there and modeled for it in my birthday suit. And a roughened patch on the upper arm where the rearview had shattered on me. That too.
I straightened and knuckled ash out of my eye. "I've been here before. When I was a kid. This place always gave me the creeps."
"I'm going to give it one more firing," he said, as if it was business as usual for him to sculpt someone and then meet him a few days later. As if I hadn't just mentioned the Hook House. "After I glaze it."
"Why? It's broken."
David turned over an empty five-gallon bucket, took the yarrow from his work table, and set it on the bucket's bottom. Then he backed me into the gap on the table and eased himself up against me so we were thigh to thigh, chest to chest, and groin to groin. His eyes, gazing into mine, were like a sun-flecked meadow.
"Because you don't throw away something special if there's a possibility you might be able to salvage it." He touched my five o'clock shadow as he spoke, as if he couldn't resist another quick feel. "I'll glaze the bisque and tie the two pieces together, and if my makeshift kiln reaches temperature, the alchemy will happen. The glaze can fuse the leg back on."
"Good as new?"
"No. Not good as new. It'll always be delicate." He pressed his damp forehead to mine. "But good enough."
I stared into his dappled eyes and wondered if I needed to say it aloud---that he couldn't fix me, not any more than he could fix the ten-year junkie. His eyes fluttered shut and he kissed me again, a slow brush of the lips, then he said, "You inspire me, you know. I saw you on the brink of death. And now? Everything might not be perfect, but I'd say it's in pretty good working order."
"I was worried maybe your friends might be right---you've got a thing for fixer-uppers."
"This house...maybe. But not you, Anthony." He sighed against my lower lip, and turned it into the brush of a kiss. "There's not a single thing I'd change."
Jordan Castillo Price hasn't worked with ceramics in nearly twenty years, but it's amazing what kinds of details are still lingering in her synapses.
She can't help but notice that some homes in her neck of the woods have small family plots beside them. And she's very jealous, because there's nothing growing in her yard but a patch of oregano---which she may or may not have spoken to.
When I started Sympathy, I had it in mind that David would be an assemblage artist, and he'd make his figures out of twigs and herbs. But I found the beautiful photo by Ryan Aresteguli of the ceramic figure that I used in the cover, and my memories of so many years with clay under my fingernails took over.
Raku and Wood Fired Heads by the author
Typical wood-fired kilns are enormous vaulted brick things. But I've fired ceramics in 55-gallon drums, and smoldering stacks of dung on the beach, so I think that where there's a will, there's a way (to fire nontraditionally.) I loved the idea of David unearthing an antique wood stove in this old Victorian he'd bought and modifying it to be his kiln.
The car accident happened to my friend's kid---though no one died in that case but the car, a 1983 Volvo. I ended up reading forum posts by people who'd suffered broken pelvises and felt the need to write a character working through that pain and frustration.
Although in the story David says that seeing Anthony being hauled out of the truck ended his sympathy for Marcus, the title actually comes from the notion of sympathetic magic, an imitative form of magic that uses trinkets, poppets or symbols as a representation of the person or thing the spell caster is trying to affect.
Beautiful • Mysterious • Bizarrefiction by Jordan Castillo PriceDon't Miss the Next Story Sign up for Jordan's Free Monthly Newsletter Today! www.tinyurl.com/jcpnews
If you liked Sympathy, check out Striking Sparks, a novelette-length story set in the PsyCop series. This story can be read independently of the rest of the PsyCop series.
Jordan Castillo Price
Andrew circled the block for the fourth time. He hadn't realized parking would be so horrible downtown. He thought he would get there in plenty of time if he left work at three, but he'd had no idea he should have given himself half an hour to find a parking space.
He went one block deeper into the side streets and spotted a gap in the parked cars. He was halfway in before he saw the fire hydrant beside the curb. He stared at the hydrant in disbelief, as if it had just appeared there to make his life miserable. Didn't it know how important today was? Didn't it realize that by this time next week, Andrew would be married?
Didn't it realize that he was scared to death?
The blast of a horn snapped Andrew back to attention. He glanced in his rearview mirror. The guy behind him was Mexican, or Hispanic, or whatever the correct term was. He looked tough. And not very happy to be waiting around while Andrew tried to park his car.
Andrew circled for eighteen more minutes before he found a spot. He walked as fast as he could. Even so, when he got to the storefront he'd been circling and circling, by the time he reached the front door, the rectangular fluorescent sign that said "open" had been unplugged.
The Tarot Card Palm Reader sign was off, too. "This can't be happening." Andrew pressed his face to the plate glass window and cupped his hands beside his eyes. There! There were candles burning inside. That meant the psychic wasn't gone yet. Because nobody just left candles burning, not with the possibility that they'd start a fire and burn down the whole building. Right?
Though this psychic, from what he'd heard, was real. Why shouldn't she leave candles burning if she knew the building would be safe?
Something moved inside the storefront, maybe-or maybe people passing him on the sidewalk were casting reflections that he mistook for motion inside. Andrew pressed his face into the glass harder, ignoring the gritty feel of the grime-coated glass against his forehead. "Hello?" he tapped on the glass to see if maybe the palm reader was still there, and maybe he could get her attention. Nothing moved. No lights came on. Andrew knocked harder, with his knuckles now, rather than his fingertips. "Hello?"
"It's closed."
Andrew jumped and spun around to face whoever had snuck up on him. His hand went to his wallet, patted it to make sure it was still where it was supposed to be, in his pocket.
The man who'd scared Andrew half to death wasn't even looking at him. He had a hand cupped around a cigarette and was busy attempting to light it despite the wind. He wore a leather biker jacket covered in safety pins and small, round badges with band names on them Andrew might have heard of, might not, and his bleached blond hair was spiked out stiff like dozens of sharp nails.
He stopped flicking his lighter and glanced at Andrew. "What?"
Andrew had been staring at his silver nosering. "Someone might still be in there."
"Nope. Saw her leave." The unlit cigarette bobbed as he spoke. "Lydia hates to miss the 5:07. You'd need to shove a big wad of money into her hand by five to keep her off that bus." He cupped his hand around the end of the cigarette and started flicking his lighter again.
"Damn it." Andrew kicked the building's concrete foundation.
The smoker stopped flicking the lighter for a moment, raised his eyebrow, and then went back to trying to light his cigarette. "What're you so stressed about? Having your palm read is usually something people do for fun, you know."
"It's just...I drove all the way here from Arlington Heights. I had to get time off to leave early and everything. And now this."
"What's the big deal? Just come back tomorrow. You don't work Saturdays, do you?"
"Oh, forget it." Andrew turned toward the sidestreet that led to the other sidestreet where he'd eventually parked his car. Obviously, he wasn't going to get a reading.
"Hold on," said the smoker. "Help me get this thing lit." He handed the lighter to Andrew and shielded both sides of his unlit cigarette from the wind. Andrew flicked the lighter; the metal wheel was already warm from striking sparks. He managed to get a small flame. The wind blew it out.
"C'mon, I won't bite. Block the wind."
Andrew repositioned himself and flicked the lighter a few more times. Cigarette met flame, and the edge crackled as the smoker inhaled. He blew a stream of smoke over Andrew's shoulder. "Want one?"
"No, I don't sm...I never really picked up the habit."
"It's never too late to learn. How about a drag?"
Andrew stared at the glowing cherry of the cigarette. The fingers of the other man's hand were stacked with silver rings. Some had esoteric-looking symbols etched into them, and others were set with stones. There was a gigantic hunk of jade on his forefinger, pale green, the color of the sugared almonds that Meredith had been bundling into tiny mesh bags all week. Two green, two blue, and a white, tied with a pale green bow and a pair of fake plastic wedding rings. There was even a poem that went with them:

Five sugared almonds for each guest to eat.
To remind us that life is both bitter and sweet
Five wishes for the new husband and wife
Health, wealth, happiness, children, and a long life!

Andrew took the cigarette, placed it to his lips, and inhaled. His fingertips smelled like butane.
Psy-Curious? Find out more at www.psycop.com

