If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls

ANGELUS

CONCLUSION

As they were leaving Chayne’s, Russell saw a battered old red Escort driving in the other direction. It honked at him and a copper haired woman in black shades smiled before driving on.

“Faye Mathisson?” Russell murmured.

“Who?”

“Nothing,” Russell said. “Only… There goes Chayne’s solitude.”

Russell had wanted to go out with Cody, but he also wanted to understand the way he felt. Sex was supposed to make him feel bound to Jason and it did. It made him want to go back to the room where he and Jason had been, and it filled him with the smell of Jason, the light tobacco, the cedar wood and sandalwood, the dark saltier smells of his sex and between his warm thighs….

But the sex also simply reminded him of sex, made him aware of what he hadn’t known before, and Russell’s mind went from the night with Jason, to the night before that Ralph had told him of, with Cody. Cody’s arms that bulged a little from his shirt sleeves, Cody’s red mouth, how Cody was supposed to be his new friend, but had spent the morning before with Ralph.

“Is there something you want to say to me, Russell?” Cody asked him, pointedly.

“Uh… not really.”

“I talked to Ralph. I mean, he called me at the shop babbling about some shit. And I thought I was going to hear from you and we would hang out. I thought you wanted to, but you’re being very silent, and you were very weird, so I’m going to ask you again: is there something you want to say to me?”

“I’m gay,” Russell said without thinking.

Then he added, “And Ralph, who is my friend, who gave me such a hard time when I didn’t know what I was, who had a girlfriend and everything, he said… He said…”

“He told you we had sex.”

“Yes!”

Cody leisurely turned the wheel on Bunting Street, and his face didn’t change.

When he didn’t say anything, Russell said, “But I thought you were my friend. And not his. And…”

“Do you have a crush on me?” Cody looked at him.

“Are you jealous of what me and Ralph did?”

“I am…” Russell began. “I am… sixteen. And really fucking confused.”

Cody sighed. He was glad for the red light.

“Russell, I’m not sixteen, and still really fucking confused. And I thought…. I thought you liked Jason. I thought he liked you. And I thought we were friends, you and me. And Ralph? I hardly know the guy, and I can hardly explain why we did what we did. I think it happened because both of us were thinking about you and Jason. I don’t know. It’s fucked up.”

After a time, Russell asked: “Did you like it? Did you like doing it with Ralph?”

“What did he tell you?”

“Not much. He just… I’m confused because…. Because I was with Jason.”

“You?” Cody said. “Had sex with Jason?”

“Yes.”

“You tell Chayne?”

“Yes. I tell him everything.”

“But, I slept with him because we’ve thought about each other for a long time, and last night I stayed with him. We… it happened. And I like him, and I care about him, and maybe I’ll love him, and I want him, but I want other things too. I don’t know. It is confusing. I thought…. I thought when you went to someone he… or she… was the Someone, and the door was closed and that was it. But that’s not quite how I feel.”

“Fuck,” Cody said. He stopped the truck and they were near the lake and everything seemed to happen at this fucking lake. Russell watched him take his hand through his chocolate brown hair that was touched by gold, and Russell watched his Adam’s apple bob in his brown, shaven throat.

Cody bent forward and pressed his mouth to Russell’s and his thick lips were warm and strong and his tongue that tasted a little of cigarettes went into Russell’s mouth and lingered with his own for just a moment. For just a moment Russell smelled sweat and spearmint and something like iron, and then Cody pulled away slowly, leaving Russell dizzy.

“Is that how you feel?” Cody asked him.

Russell felt dazed and out of his body even as he’d never felt more in it.. It was a moment before he realized Cody was waiting for an answer. Is that how you feel? Cody’s lips pressed to his. Is that how you feel? Taste of cigarettes and the rough tongue, smell of the heat of the day on Cody’s skin… the afternoon after his virginity was gone. Is that how you feel?

“Yes,” he said, and his voice was a little sad.

“Don’t worry,” Cody put a hand that was strong and large knuckled, warm on Russell’s khakied thigh, “you’ll figure it out.”

Nothing mattered right now. No, that wasn’t it. Nothing was the way it was supposed to be. They were in a fearful space. Russell was afraid of what he was about to do, but more afraid of not doing it. He didn’t let himself think when he put his hand on Cody’s knee, when he kept rubbing it and then realized Cody hadn’t stopped rubbing his. His hands slipped between Cody’s thighs and he started to knead him. If Cody moaned, Russell didn’t hear it. He didn’t look while his hands undid Cody’s fly. Cody helped him.

Russell pushed his hair out of his face and bent down and took the length and girth of Cody in his mouth. The head of his cock, the thickness of it felt so good. He went to his knees in the truck. He felt Cody’s hands come down in his hair, then rise. As Russell almost gagged trying to swallow all of him, and he heard the other young man whimper, he knew Cody had wanted to hold his head and fuck his mouth, but stopped because he was decent, because he was sweet. That was why Russell loved him and fuck it, he was in love with this guy he’d just met. As he sucked on him, discovering the shaft, the leaping vein beneath, the v under the head, he pulled Cody’s hand into his hair and began to move his mouth up and down, like he had for Jason, like Jason had done for him, urging Cody to fuck his mouth.

He wished they were in Cody’s house, could do more, could do this longer.

“Russ…” Cody whispered through clinched teeth. “Please stop. I’m gonna…”

Russell went down harder and Cody’s hands flew up. His voice opened in a broken cry, the same time Russell’s mouth filled with the curious hot, numbing wax and salt of his semen. Russell kept sucking him. Kept licking till it was all gone. He held Cody in his hand, still pulsing, the brown cock, red headed in its wilting. Russell released it, but he was hard now.  As he moved to get back in his seat, Cody, winded, blank faced, put his beautiful penis back into his pants.

The world had stopped, but now it began again. The sounds of cars passing. A plane overhead.

“I don’t know if I will figure it out,” Russell said.

At last Cody said, placing his large hand on Russell’s leg, so close to his erection:

“We’ll figure it out. You know, people say love is all that matters, but love is vague. Friendship, that’s what matters.”

They drove a while and Cody turned up the radio. Dionne Warwick asked:

 

Do you know the way to San Jose?
I've been away so long
I may go wrong and lose my way

Do you know the way to San Jose?
I'm going back to find
Some peace of mind in San Jose

LA is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star
Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas

 

Normalcy returned to them. Daylight partially obscured the clouds of confusion.

Russell was looking down from the cab of Cody’s truck as they drove down Bunting when he said, “Cody, stop!”

“Um?” Cody Barnard blew smoke from his nostrils.

“Pull over, I know that girl.”

Russell could still taste Cody’s semen in his mouth.

They pulled over to the chain link fence, clear on the other side of it was the brick structure of Rosary High School.

Russell rolled down the window, and Cameron Dwyer looked up from the bicycle she was working on.

“Cam!”

She squinted and then smiled up and said, “Russell? Thank God.

“I’m trying to fix my bike.”

She displayed her oil blackened hands.

“The chain’s shot.”

“Hop in,” Cody leaned over Russell. “Russell, help her get the bike in the bed.”

Russell was already out of the truck. Two cars sped down Bunting toward downtown.

When Cameron climbed into the car, Cody took off his blue bandanna and handed it to her. “Wipe your hands off. What’s your name again?”

“Cameron,” she said the same time Russell did. She looked at the bandanna and told Cody, “I couldn’t.”

“Oh, I think you can,” he shoved the rumpled bandanna into her blackened hands. “It cost fifty cents,” he informed her and drove on.

“Cameron is my next door neighbor,” Russell said.

“Were you headed home?”

“I was, actually.”

“Don’t you worry, Cameron. I’m a mechanic. My assistant and I will make your bike good as new. We’re headed toward your area right now.”

“Then we’re going to Chayne’s house,” Russell told him.

“My dad went to school with Chayne,” Cameron said. “College. So did my uncle I guess.”

“I think Chayne told me that.”

“Russell, it’s weird that we don’t know each other better,” Cameron told him. “I mean, our dads car pool together. We belong to the same church. You know my brother and my cousin. We know a lot of the same people.”

“Life’s weird like that,” Cody chimed in.

“But Cody thinks we’re all in a sacred net,” Russell muttered.

“What?” the pretty girl turned to Cody, intrigued.

“Well, when my distinguished colleague says it that way, it sounds stupid,” Cody said. “But basically it means we are all like fish caught up in this one net—or web, if you will.”

“We will,” Russell said.

“Ha,” Cody dryly returned.

 “And if we’re meant to meet we will meet sooner or later.”

“I don’t remember that part of the theory,” Russell remarked.

“It’s evolving,” Cody said, rubbing Russell’s knee as they turned off of Bernard and hit Breckinridge.

“Here we are, young Cameron.”       

“Thanks, both of you.”

“We’ll just fix your bike right here. Right now,” said Cody.

“We can do it in my driveway,” Cameron said.

“That’s exactly what I was going to suggest.”

“I thought you knew what you were doing,” Russell told Cody.

“I thought you’d kiss my ass,” Cody returned, hands, covered in oil.

“I was just thinking that a great mechanic like yourself would be able to fix a common bicycle.”

“If a Duster can’t outsmart me, then neither will a bike. Cameron, we need a new chain.”

Cameron, placidly sitting on the grass between the Lewis and Dwyer driveway, nodded.

“Russ, it’s almost time for dinner,” Thom said, coming out of the kitchen door in shorts and a blue Oxford shirt, sleeves rolled up.

“Cameron,” he nodded to Bill’s daughter.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Thom offered his hand to Cody.

“Cody Barnard, sir,” Cody offered his hand, then grimaced, and Thom took it anyway and said. “It’s time for us all to wash up. Why don’t you stay for dinner?”

Cody was about to be kind and refuse, then realized kindness was actually accepting hospitality and that if he left, Cameron’s bike would be chainless.

“Alright,” he said. “Thank you, sir.”

“Thom’ll do,” Thom called back, heading into the house.

“You staying for dinner too, Cameron?”

“I’ll go over and ask my parents,” she said, rising. “I’ll be right back.”

“Then we can get that chain,” said Cody.

“Um,” he remarked. “We were supposed to be at Chayne’s house by now. One Chayne for another. Imagine that.”

“When Chayne says six, he means around six,” Russell said. “And that’s when Anigel gets back and starts to cook so… really eight.”

“Call him, though,” Cody said. “You know. To be respectful.”

Russell nodded. They rolled the bicycle onto the lawn. The summer sun was still high. In the distance, however, the bells of Saint Adjeanet’s rang One, Two, Three, Four and Five to Six. There was a stillness in the air, then suddenly a pinging, a ponging, a ringing in the air, one after the other, and Cameron was running out of her house to stand next to them. They stood there until the bells were over, and Cody said, “That was beautiful. I bet I heard that every day and it’s the first time I’ve ever listened.”

“The angel declared unto Mary…” Russell began.

Cameron looked at him and said, “And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.”

“What?” Cody looked at both of them.

“The prayer you say,” Russell said, “three times a day, when those bells ring. A Hail Mary three times, to remember God is in the world. Because, well because when Gabriel came to Mary he said all that, and that was the moment Jesus was conceived. And so… whenever we are with each other, it’s like we’re with God, because God became a human and we’re humans. It’s a…. Chayne could explain it better. A priest couldn’t.

“So every time those bells ring, it sort of happens all over again. We’re holy again. The world is holy again because God comes into the world again.”

“That was…. Deeper than I was going to go,” Cameron admitted, looking as embarrassed for her ignorance as Russell was for his sudden sermon.

Cody only said, “I didn’t grow up with religion.”

“We don’t have a choice,” Cameron said, ironically as they turned up the walk to 1735 Breckinridge. “We’re Catholic school kids, and to be honest, until Russell reminded me, I had forgotten all that.”

“Actually, I think I was reminding myself,” Russell admitted.

“But that’s beautiful,” Cody said, looking at Russell. “God in the world…”

Under Cody’s direct gaze, his direct questioning, a chord deep in Russell vibrated.

“What’s that called?”

“The prayer?” Russell said to Cody..

“The Angelus.”