The City of Rossford

Mathan’s phone buzzed while he was driving.

“You wanna get that?”

“No,” Meredith said. “Why do we have to carry cell phones?”

She reached into his pocket and flipped it open.

“Sheridan?” she said, after looking at the screen.

“Yeah, we were just checking up on you guys.”

“Well,” Meredith said, “you found us.”

“Not really. Where are you?”

“We’re out,” she said, feeling difficult.

“Fine,” Sheridan said, tonelessly.

“We went to the maximum security juvenile center to visit Kip Danley.”

“Oh,” Sheridan sounded surprised. “That was nice.”

“I guess.”

“We skipped school. I mean, we walked out of it after French. So we were there half the day. Chay is with me right now.”

“So, I guess you all are friends again.”

“Chay and Sheridan?” Mathan guessed, eyes still on the road.

Meredith nodded.

“Yeah,” Sheridan said. “And… we all need to talk.”

“Alright.”

“I hear it in your voice,” Sheridan said. “We need to talk, or else… we’re not going to be friends anymore. I feel it.”

Meredith didn’t know what to say. Sheridan had just put it in her face, very openly.

“We’ve been leading very, very separate lives,” she said after a while, loud enough so Mathan could hear. “And you—and Chay too—seem like you like it that way.”

“Well,” Sheridan decided, “that’s about to stop. No more secrets, alright? I mean not from you guys. Because there are things we have to be able to tell you, and you have to be able to listen, and not go all crazy.”

“That’s not fair,” Meredith said.

“I know. You’re right. It isn’t. I’m sorry for not trusting you guys. I’m gonna go now, alright?”

Meredith nodded, and then remembered to say alright. She hung up the phone.

“What was that all about?” Mathan said after a while.

Meredith sighed. “I’m not sure. I should be happy. And I am. But I’m a little scared, too. And I don’t really know why.”

Chay was sitting on the edge of Sheridan’s bed when his friend came back in, closing his cell phone. He could hear the clump of Sheridan’s shoes on the floorboards. He never wore sneakers. He almost always wore those old, brown casual shoes, and Chay had forgotten that. Sheridan slipped his phone into one of the pockets of his red hoodie and sat down beside Chay.

“They’re on the road. They went to visit that Kip Danley.”

Chay frowned.

“If not for Kip,” Sheridan reminded him, “none of those guys would have gone to jail. He risked a lot so Robin could get some justice.”

“But Robin’s still dead.”

“Yeah,” Sheridan murmured, his lips close to Chay’s ear.

Chay turned around and kissed him, and then pulled away, his friend giving him a questioning grin. He could still feel the softness of Sheridan’s lips.

“You kissed me twice and I let you get away with it,” Chay said. “I never made you accountable for it. I thought you were about to do it again. I wanted to beat you to it.”

“I wasn’t,” Sheridan said. Then he said, “Maybe I was.”

They looked at each other.

“I’m going to close the door now,” Chay said.

Sheridan raised an eyebrow.

“You gonna seduce me?”

“Yeah,” Chay said in an equally light voice. “Is that alright?”

He shut the door softly. Sheridan heard the lock click.

“I dunno,” he said, “Maybe.”

He shrugged and Chay sat beside him.

Then Sheridan said, “Is your heart beating? Like really, really fast?”

Chay just kissed him.

It felt so good. It felt so good to put his hands in Chay’s hair, to pull up Chay’s smaller body onto him, to let the thunder of blood in the ears, and the racing in his heart go as they fell onto the bed, and then he let Chay be in control, He lifted his arms as Chay removed his sweatshirt, and he leaned forward to kiss him, and then lay down as Chay unbuckled his pants and pulled down his jeans. Tenderly they began to undress each other, fumbling with shoes, chuckling a little until they were down to only socks and they lay on the bed together, kissing and stroking, touching. Chay’s mouth was on his throat, on his nipples on his belly. Sheridan was so hard. He felt his penis rising and Chay didn’t ask, and then Sheridan gasped and he closed his eyes while he lay on his back and Chay took him in his mouth. Sheridan looked down to Chay’s head. When the movement of his head commanded it, Sheridan opened his legs for Chay’s mouth, receiving gentle kisses on the inside of his thighs, being kissed all up and down until, surprisingly, he felt his eyes stinging with tears.

When he opened his eyes, Chay swam before him a little. He was not fragile like Sheridan had once believed. He was solid and dense like stone, and he rose up on his knees over Sheridan. His body seemed completely made of light but for the darkness of the hair of his head, and of the cloud over his sex. His penis was thick and Sheridan went to touch it, to stroke it, to make Chay moan a little, and then he moaned as he realized that Chay was moving to situate himself on him, as he felt the heat and the firmness of his buttocks, and then the hot tightness of being in him and then, as Chay’s hands came to rest lightly on his chest, brushing his nipples, and Chay leaned down to kiss him, to place his tongue in Sheridan’s mouth, Sheridan Klasko experienced the wild shock of being ridden.

Meredith and Mathan sat on the sofa, tired, while Todd brought out cups of soup.

“Thank you,” Fenn said in tender amazement. He put down his cigarette and looked with love on Tood, who was setting the trays down, while Lee continued smoking.

“Well, it’s just soup. And Fenn does the cooking most of the time anyway.”

“Um,” Lee leaned forward and inhaled.

“Tortilla soup,” Todd said. “I’ll bring out the chips.”

“So what all happened with the crazy lady?” Mathan said.

“Dylan’s mother?” Fenn raised an eyebrow. “We went over and found her. We promised to bring Dylan by her place for visits.”

“You what?” Meredith said.

“Meredith,” Fenn said, “she’s his mother.”

“She abandoned him,” Meredith protested, jabbing her spoon into the soup as Todd came out with a bag of tortilla chips.

“But now she’s back, and I can’t see keeping her away from her son,” Fenn explained, sprinkling chips into his large mug.

“That’s awfully big of you,” Mathan said.

“It’s awfully necessary,” Fenn said. “And it doesn’t make Dylan one bit less mine. I prefer her being with him when one of us is accompanying them to her sneaking up in the park.”

“But,” Mathan started. And then he finished.

“What?” said Lee to his nephew.

Todd sat down beside Fenn and took one of his cigarettes, lighting it, and then shaking the match out.

“Nothing,” Mathan said.

“What’s to stop her from coming around anyway?” Meredith said for him. “What’s to stop her from doing something crazy?”

“Caroline,” Fenn said.

Mathan looked at his cousin.

“Your new cousin, Caroline,” Lee said.

“She’s more than a Tarot card reader, less than a voodoo queen,” Fenn said. “She put a mojo on Eileen Wehlan, right there in her apartment. Put all the curses of hell on her if she ever decided to run off with Dylan.”

No one laughed. They all looked at Fenn in shock.

“You believe her?” Meredith said, at last.

“She is not the first in the family,” Lee said. “And she won’t be the last. Lula used to keep a voodoo jar over her door to keep all of her men in line. I know her mother did. They were from New Orleans and before that, I guess from Haiti.”

“I only know a little of that,” Fenn said. “But the important thing is if you had been there you would have believed it. And what was more, Eileen Wehlan believed it. It’s good as I can hope for. Better, actually.”

Meredith still looked a little unconvinced, and Todd said, “You know this world is strange. You know there’s stuff beyond reason.”

“And speaking of beyond reason,” said Lee, who had nothing more to say about the voodoo buried in the Houghton family, “how was your class cutting trip?”

“Good,” Meredith reported. Then she amended: “Well, necessary, really. You know? I couldn’t not go.”

“I was just thinking… It’s just… someone was telling me about these Indians, or these feminists or something…”

“Indians or feminists?” Mathan looked at her.

“Oh, shut up.”

“You can’t tell them apart?”

“Maybe they were feminist Indians,” Todd cracked.

“Anyway,” Meredith said, “my point is they were trying to preserve a forest from being destroyed, and they threaded yarn through all the trees, right? They thought it would just give the loggers a hard time, make things a little more difficult. But it turns out chainsaws can’t cut through yarn. They got tangled; some of the chainsaws were even destroyed. Some loggers were hurt. They were undone by yarn.

“People are always trying to do the big things to save the world. You know? But, it’s the little things, little thing after little thing that does it, I think. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know. But, it just isn’t as hard as we think it is to do something good, and being there for Robin till she died, or for her mother, or even for Kip Danley… Well, that’s the good I can do.”

After a while she looked at them all and said, “What?”

“You are an amazing girl,” Lee said simply, “and my nephew is amazing for having the sense to choose you.”

Mathan’s phone buzzed and he reached into his pocket.

Meredith, who had gone red, turned to look at the phone screen.

“It’s Sheridan,” Mathan said. “He wants to know when we’re coming over.”

Meredith said, “Tell him as soon as we’re done eating.”

“He and Chay really want to talk to us.”

“I really want to talk to them,” Meredith said. “And I’m so nervous. I don’t know why.”

Lee and Fenn looked at each other, their dead cigarettes hanging from their hands, and then Lee said to his nephew and Meredith, “As amazing as you have been already, and always are to me, you may have to be amazing one more time before this night is through.”