If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls

AMENDS

CONCLUSION

Kristin, Denise, Patti and Felice were all standing together, looking into the nursery at the newly named Kathleen Patricia Mc.Llarchlahn.

Patti, hair and body frazzled, yawned.

“Whenever I see a baby,” Kristin began, touching her stomach, and then she stopped.

Felice concluded, “You wonder if yours’ll be as ugly?”

Kristin looked shocked, but Patti laughed.

“But it’s true,” Felice said. “when we all come, we’re all ugly. Don’t worry. it takes a few days for the cute to settle in.”

“For some of us it never does,” Denise said.

Patti snorted and asked her sister, “You remembered to call Mom and Dad, right?”

“I’m not completely useless,” Denise said.

“I know—” Patti began.

“I’ll call them now,” Denise said, turning to walk toward the pay phone.

“Damnit, Denise!” John said.

“Let Denise be Denise,” Patti, tugged her brother’s shirt sleeve.

“Ah, God,” she sighed, “They grow so fast. You alright Kristin?”

“Yeah, I just need to go to the bathroom. Excuse me, ladies.”

Hands on her stomach, Kristin went daintily into the ladies restroom down the hall.

“That’s a brave woman. I can’t imagine getting a baby for my fortieth birthday.”

“There’s still time,” Patti teased.

“Bitch, shut your mouth,” Felice dismissed it, “You know, Jaclyn was pretty good. Except for the time she grabbed Doctor Sheidler by the throat and said, ‘Give me some drugs now you sadistic Nazi bastard’, she handled herself with complete decorum.”

Patti knew that Jackie couldn’t have a baby and not leave the hospital unaffected. She remembered the stories told about her own temper when she’d given birth to Russell. She remembered people saying, you forgot all about the pain. You didn’t. It was the worst in the world in the worst place imaginable. She remembered how small and ugly the baby in her arms had been and how she’d thought, “I pushed and pushed for this?” But then he took her breast and she knew it was more than worth it. And it seemed so long ago now. Sometimes she saw the tall young man with the long red hair and the sharp green eyes, and when he was bent over his guitar, pushing the hair out his face, or doing his homework, she did see the baby. But mostly she saw someone else completely. Without resentment, more with marvel, she saw a stranger, and it was so odd that she had given birth to a stranger, someone who was his own person and had a million different faces that had little or nothing to do with her.

She decided not to talk to him about the half empty pack of Marlboros he had accidentally left on his bed—which she now realized could not have been Thom’s.

At the point of this resolution, Patti heard a wail from the bathroom, and Felice’s eyes flew wide and round in her very brown face.

“Was that Kris—?” started Felice.

“PAT-I I I I I I I I  ! ! !” the two women heard Kristin cry, and went to the restroom to get her.

 

“That old bitch would upstage me by shooting her kid out on the same day,” Jackie murmured with no true rancor.

The nurse had brought baby Kathleen to her, and wearily she took her breast out, and as the baby struggled to latch to her nipple, Jackie thought how she and Kristin were both in for a very long day.

“We called Reese,” Thom said from the doorway. “He’s on his way.”

“A regular family reunion,” R.L. remarked.

“I better be getting home,” Cody said.

“And I need to go to school,” Russell said.

“Did you really just say,” Patti asked her son, “that you needed to go to school?”

“That’s the cue for you and Dad to say, ‘no son, why don’t you just go to bed and rest.’”

“No, son,” Patti said. “Why don’t you just go to bed and rest.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Russell said, kissing her on the cheek and saluting Patti as he walked out of the room with Cody, “I think I will.”

John sat beside the bed, looking at his child and smiling, feeling proud and completely useless.

Raggedly, Jackie began to whisper:

    

Don’t sing love songs

you’ll wake my mother

she’s sleeping here,

right by my siiide...

 

Then R.L. began, first so quiet his son beside him could not hear him, then loud enough, but not too loud for a hospital:

 

In her right hand

is a silver dagger

she says that I

can’t be your bride.

 

Jackie looked up at her father and then down at her child and they both whispered:

 

“My Daddy was is a handsome devil

he’s got a chain

five miles long

on ev’ry lake

a heart does dangle

another maid

he’s loved and wronged...”

 

 

No one is coming home today, not for long. They are all waiting for Kristin’s baby. Rusell will return alone to see his new niece or his new nephew, but right now is his time. It is their time because Jason has never been here before, because all their past  times were in the dark back room of the large house three blocks up the street. But every time he returns from there, every time he jauntily comes home with his book bag over his shoulder, knowing he looks like a child, is playing the part of a child, Russell wants this.

Russell Lewis’s mind and body are so overwhelmed he’d give himself to Jason and Cody at the same time, so caught up in desire that whenever he kisses Jason’s mouth he thinks of Cody and knows if Cody was here he would see Jason, feel Jason.

Russell wants this to happen in his room, high on the balconied second storey of 1735 Breckinridge with windows on three sides of the immense room and the sun shining on them. Even when Jason is worried, Russell is not. He locks the door, sets him on the bed, pulls down his trousers, still the school trousers though Jason being Jason, he’s cleaned, he’s changed. He’s thick when  Russell takes him in his mouth, when Russell, mouth full, sighs to hear Jason sigh, to feel his mouth slightly fucked, to feel Jason’s hands in his hair, his body slackening, relaxing, at home in Russell’s mouth, his ass kneaded by Russell’s hands.

They rise half tired to undress and come together on the bed. They are young. The fire always arises. Together they weave through frustration, joy, lust, desire, take the fire path that ends in sweat and gasping, in trails of semen splayed across rumbled bedspreads and hot boy skin.

He has longed for this moment, when in the heat of full sun, after hard lovemaking, he and Jason lay naked and splayed out together, brown limbs and white limbs like a lovely half asleep spider, a little wet, dampened by sweat and spit and semen, the sun shining on his ass as, drowsily, his thighs move with Jason’s, and they kiss.

 

 

 

In the darkness, Cody grips the pillow and demands right here what he has longed for but cannot have. His own hair falling in his face he pictures as red hair, the penis, pulsing as it pushes in him, he imagines as Russell’s the same time he imagines himself as Russell, slowly and thoroughly being fucked, the bed like a slow moving raft on the water.

Shoulders bunching together, mouth on his throat, faces pressed together, bodies pressed together, feet stretched out together, Cody arches his ass, pushes back to the pushing, fucks as he is fucked.

“Is that good?... Is that good?”

“Yes,” Cody gasps. “God, yes.”

Online last night they found each other, and they have found their way to this empty apartment over the Noble Red.

“Don’t stop fucking me,” Cody demands.

Gathering up speed, so that Cody begins to cry out in satisfaction, Brad Long rises up on the flats of his hands. In rhythm to his fucking he vows: “I won’t! I won’t. I won’t”

 

 

When Nehru Alexander got to the house on Curtain Street, his cousin Gilead was already there.

“Don’t you have school?” Nehru said witheringly.

Gilead, in black slacks and blazer, looked up from the sofa and said, “Don’t you?”

Nehru did not answer, but went into the kitchen.

“Could everyone end up at my house today?” Chayne asked as Nehru began rifling through the pantry.

“Everyone?”

“Russell’s passed out upstairs in his room. He was at the hospital all night.”

Nehru raised an eyebrow.

“His aunt gave birth.”

“Which one?”

“Both of them.”

“On the same—”

 Chayne nodded before Nehru got the rest of the sentence out of his mouth.

“Well, shit,” muttered Nehru and left the room.

    

In the middle of the afternoon when Nehru Alexander came out to the porch with two beers and sat on one side of Chayne, and passed the beer to Gilead, who sat on the other side, Chayne said nothing. He yawned, but said nothing.

“I’m glad we’re a family,” Nehru said, throwing his arm over his older cousin.

Chayne frowned.

“Who the fuck is that?”

A car had parked across the street from them, which no one had taken much note of until the driver stepped across the street and stood at the walk with his hands jammed in his pockets. He wore khakis with rolled cuffs and a varsity jacket and had dark wavy hair, a longish, not unhandsome face and eyes of no particular color. His mouth smiled impishly, and Nehru said:

“He must go to Our Lady.”

“I’m Mark Young,” Mark Young said as Gilead put his beer down.

“I’m Gilead’s study buddy. Sir, you must be Gilead’s father.”

“The hell I must be. How the fuck old do I look?”

“He’s my cousin,” Gilead said, “and I’m sitting right here, as you can see.”

“I was trying to be respectful,” Mark said, kicking the ground with his boat shoes.

“We’re not going to bite you,” Chayne said. “And we’re not the Royal Family.”

“Well, we are Princes,” Nehru commented, as Chayne ignored this and beckoned Mark forward with a finger.

“Do you always look like that?” Chayne asked him.

“Like….?”

“Like the cat…. Who just ate a canary?”

“I think,” Gilead said, smiling from behind his beer, “he looks a little like the cat who knocked over the Christmas tree.”

“Uh…” Mark started. Then he spat out, “I just came to ask Gil if he wanted to do anything?”

Before one of his cousins could open their mouths, Gilead said, “What would you like to do?”

He sensed that if anyone else on the porch said anything else, Mark would jump out of his skin.

“I… uh… hadn’t thought about it.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Ralph Balusik. He said you and Russell would be here.”

“Should I get Russell?” Gilead asked.

“You… could.”

“Not,” Chayne said.

“Now, Gil, go get a breath mint and slap some water on your face so can look like a seventeen year old who hasn’t been drinking, and go do whatever teenagers do.”

 

An hour or so later, when darkness was setting in, Russell Lewis blinked up at the ceiling and murmured, “Holy shit.”

Two cousins born in one day and a weird dream about Cody he was not going into. He had planned to stop over by Jason’s house but hadn’t even called his parents, and to make things weirder, or worse, he had just gotten up, gone to sleep and left Gilead. Not that Gilead was among strangers, after all, Chayne and Nehru were family. But still.

    

When Russell came downstairs in the house on Curtain Street, it was alight with early evening, and Anigel was on the sofa with a text book on her lap. Rob, pencil behind his ear, lifted it to wave at Russell, and Nehru was in the kitchen with Chayne.

“Where’s Gil?” Russell asked.

“With Mark Young,” Chayne said, not turning from the chicken he was butchering.

“Mark Young?” Russell said.

A smile on his face, Nehru nodded.

“Mark,” he said, “Young.”