Nights in White Satin

By the time Justine Barnard had said, “Shane, I just hope you’ve got my girl on the pill,” prickles of horror were popping up all over Jill and she was cursing her friends, wondering how much longer it could be until someone arrived. When the doorbell rang it vibrated through Jill’s spine, and she leapt to answer it.

“Oh, my God, I’m so glad to see you!” she told Anigel and Nehru, and yanked them both inside.

“Hey people,” Justine was saying, “Jilly never told me you all were Black. Thank God she added a little color to her life!”

“I grew up around here,” Thom said at last.

“That’s right,” Russell remembered. They weren’t far from Thompson Street and the River. As they made a turn on Moringham and arrived at Colum Street, Thom Lewis sat up. Cody pulled up to 7815. The truck stopped. He and Russell got out and Thom remained.

“Thom,” Cody called.

He didn’t respond, and then he blinked a few times and looked down at them.

“I know this house,” Thom told them.

“See,” Cody smiled. “It just proves that everything is linked.”

Russell was not quite so satisfied with this answer, but he loved the feel of Cody’s hand slipping into his..

Thom was not satisfied by Cody’s answer either. He frowned a little, then climbed out of the car and rounded it to climb the steps with Cody. They all went in. Thom was looking around as Cody was introducing Russell to his mother. Russell was a little confused because Mrs. Barnard was paying entirely too much attention to his father who was staring at everything in the room with a hard eye.

Cody said, “And this is Thom Lewis—”

And Justine Barnard said, “Oh, my God.”

“You haven’t been yourself all night,” Cody said when all the others were leaving.

“Neither has Dad.”

“True. But I’m talking about you, and apparently Dad and Mom went to school together, so problem solved. But you?”

Russell said. “Before we got here some strange stuff happened.”

“Really?” Cody said an eyebrow.

When Russell nodded, Cody said, “You wanna hang out a bit and talk? I can drop you back home.”

“Do you mind?” Russell asked.

“If I minded, I wouldn’t offer. We’ll have to be polite before making our exeunt.”

“Can we drive around and hang out at the place on Thompson?”

“Behind the gas station? For sure.”

When he told told Thom, the look on Thom’s face was strange. Cody wondered if he had something to say, but instead Thom said, “Whatever’s on my mind can wait. It’s good to see you and Russell hanging out.”

“Yeah, well,” Cody smiled, not knowing what to say. “We are friends and stuff, you know?”

“Yeah,” Thom nodded as he prepared to go. “I know.”

 “Get the salt, Niall. The salt. Don’t be a dummy. It’s right in front of you,” Bill said. “If you were a snake it would’ve bitten you.”

“Bill, that’s enough,” his mother-in-law said.

No one else had said anything. Cameron noticed her father was grouchier than usual in regards to his only son. And Niall was far less together than usual. In reaching for the salt he knocked over its drink and sat stupid, watching the red Kool-Aid pour all over the table.

“Niall,” started his father. But as Niall got up, Bill reached across the table, three his white napkin over the red liquid, and murmured, “Siddown, dummy.”

“William!” Mrs. Armstrong clapped a hand to the table.     “Bill,” Dena warned, “that really is enough. Sit, Niall.”

“Niall, are you alright?” Uncle Dave, who was on the other side of Niall, asked. Niall nodded, but their grandmother said. “Why don’t you go take a walk or watch some television.”

“I’m fine.” Niall said.

“Then go watch TV,” Dena said in a voice that was quiet, but not to be denied, and Niall nodded, folded his napkin, and left the wide dining room with the glass doors that looked out over the lake.

“Something’s wrong with that boy,” Bill murmured as his son trudged down the hall.

“And you’re helping the something by growling at him like a son of a bitch?” Dena asked him. “Sometimes you’re just like your father.”

“Don’t say a word about my Dad,” Bill warned.

Lee grimaced, but Dena continued, “What are you going to do, slap me like he slapped your mom? I dare you, Bill Dwyer.”

“Please,” Lee begged. “Please, guys. This is supposed to be a good weekend.”

“You made this weekend, Lee,” Bill turned on his sister. “You decided this, with no one’s permission.”

“We all decided,” Dena said. “Sit down.”

Bill glared at his wife.

“Sit,” Dena said, feeling a power she hadn’t felt in a long time, “down.”

They headed down Colum and then onto Thompson Road, a short trip, and Cody offered his joint to Russell who coughed on the smoke while his head buzzed. He felt better, more at ease, pleased and happy to be in Cody’s presense where things were simple, and it wasn’t that Cody was stupid, but he was simple. There were no lies and pretending in him, which is what Russell said when they were drinking sodas in a bedroom of the old gas station house.

“I’m just me,” Cody shrugged.

“I wish I was just me.”

“Your just me is a different just me,” Cody said. “But you’re the realest just me I know.”

Russell grinned over this.

“It’s hot in here,” Cody said.

“It’s probably that dress shirt,” Russell said, “I didn’t even know you owned a dress shirt.”

“It’s for special occasions,” Cody said as he unbuttoned it and turning around, gently folded it on the bed.

“Now, I am the shirtless hillbilly who usually hangs out at this place.”

Cody sat on the edge of the bed in the small room, his dark chocolate hair hanging over his bare shoulders. Russell had wanted him to take off his shirt, and could see that he was, in fact, beautiful with his shirt off, as he sat there in baggy blue jeans.

“Guess what?” Cody said. “I was with Nehru and Brad all last night... and it looks like they’re going to be a couple.”

   Russell had been almost sure that Nehru and Cody were, if not a couple, doing something, and he wanted to ask about this but chose not to.

“That’s… great,” Russell said instead. “I mean, it really is. It’s great.”

Cody frowned.

“So that thing we were talking about? What’s troubling you?”

“Oh,” Russell said. Then Russell said, “Jason came over.”

Cody patted the bed for Russell to sit beside him, and Russell did.

“That Jason kid’s confused,” Cody said.

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m confused too.”

“Howso?”

Cody didn’t coddle him. Russell said, “My cousin Jimmy, you all are a lot alike, said I didn’t love Jason. He said that I shouldn’t be surprised it it doesn’t last. He was right of course.”

“Maybe he’s worth meeting.”

“You’d like him. Cody, I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“No, I mean—”

“I know how you mean. I’ve always loved you. You shouldn’t have had to say it to me.”

Cody kissed Russell. He put his hands on either side of Russell’s face, and pulled him.

“We had said this would be… difficult to manage.”

“I’m a lot older than you,” Cody interrupted this with a firm kiss, “so yeah, it’s going to be difficult to manage.”

“I…”

“Let’s not talk right now,” Cody said. “Talking gets in the way of things.”

And Russell knew it did, and he knew he wasn’t interested in talking, and he wanted what Cody wanted and they lay on the bed, linking arms and legs, Cody lifting Russell’s shirt, unbuttoning his pants. This was love, and it wasn’t that Jason wasn’t love and Ralph wasn’t either, but they had been a sort of shadow. When he had lain on his back and held Ralph to him, running his hands up and down his back, watching his buttocks flex and unflex, he had thought of Cody. When he had fucked Jason in his bedroom, he had thought of Cody too. Now, with Cody, there was only this hot, soft, fragile moment. He didn’t want to describe it. He just wanted to be there for it. He started to cry. His tears obscured his view of Cody over him, the trembling in him obscured Cody inside him. What was gentle became fierce, Russell’s hands clutching Cody’s chest, Russell pressing himself down to feel Cody deep inside and, at last, the time when he lay on his back, thighs draped over Cody’s shoulders, plowed harder while Cody murmured, “Fuck! Fuck! Oh… my!” Or was it Russell swearing, Russell pressing against him?

When he was about to come, and Russell was clutching Cody’s strong neck, he looked down over his broad, brown back to see his ass, two ivory hills pushing deeper, flexing. They came at the same time, crying out almost in terror. Russell felt like a cracked egg with all the yolk spilled out.  As he ejactulated, he was nothing but light until, at last, while Cody, released from his orgasm, and coming down from the tips of his toes, collapsed, penis still hard, still deep in Russell, and the two of them lay exhausted and heaving, one draped over the other.

The house had been different then. But then so had they all. The neighborhood was still run down, but then, not as run down as it was now and also, what did he have to compare it with accept an equally run down Thompson Street. That and West Virginia?

This was the house of growing up. Was that twenty-three, twenty-four or twenty-five years ago? Long enough for it to be another world.

She had looked a great deal like Jill back then, he remembered. Only she was never tall, never quite as stately.

There had been an elicit thrill in all of the to-hell-with-what-the-priest-says. And maybe if they’d had to go to confession once a week that might have changed things. But that business had been done away with. Besides, this wasn’t just fun. It was actual love. There was a tenderness in the way the two fifteen year olds sat in her bedroom upstairs necking and taking each others clothes off, and then fucking gently, then harder and harder until he came and she let him give a broken tenor yell because no one was at home.

Mom and Dad were never at home.

There had been a day, one of the last days, when Justine said that they were moving away. Dad had a job down south. This was the thing they had not counted on. Eventual marriage, a white picket fence was what they’d assumed. It hurt to realize that long before Patti there had been someone else, a childhood away, with whom he’d planned to share his life.

That day they’d kissed wetly and stripped with urgency, and he still remembered it, her straddling him on the floor. Him pounding her gently in front of the TV.  The noises of happiness and fury and sorrow and pleasure, her hands grasping his back, his small chest, his face, the sweat from the west sun through the window, on his back, on his head, her hands running frantically up and down his buttocks....

And he remembered a few days after she was gone. He was being fifteen and riding bikes with some of his friends. They’d come down here. He remembered his friends telling sex stories, wildly overblown, anatomically and physiologically impossible, and looking at him and saying, “Tommy’s so quiet. Tommy’s a good boy.”

Then he, like the rest of them, took one more look at 7815 Colum Street and rode away.

Through the whole dinner Thom Lewis’s eyes went from face to face, and his mouth made conversation.  Anigel Reyes. Beautiful, beautiful girl, she could capture anyone’s attention. And this Nehru, a cousin of Chayne’s. He could see it in the laughter as well as the spectacles. That added to the fact that he just didn’t seem to give a damn. And so young not to give a damn! And Jill he’d seen several times, swinging her hair and alternately chiding and praising Shane. These were all Russell’s friends.

Most disturbing, now Cody and Russell were both gone. Like and yet unlike. Jackie had said that, and she’d said that Cody looked a lot like Finn. Jackie had said that Cody actually resembled Thom. So had Patti. And so had his mother. And Cody resembled Russell. In hair length, in composure, in the cigarettes they smoked—that Thom smoked. But Thom acknowledged fot the first time that Russell did not resemble him at all. Russell resembled his namesake who was living over in an apartment on Royal Street. Russell and Cody both looked like R.L. He looked from one to the other. He didn’t look at Justine, the only other person in the room his age.

Justine got up and went to the kitchen. Thom’s eyes followed her departing back.

“Thom, what’s wrong?” Jill demanded.

Thom turned Jill what he knew must be a ridiculous look, and then said, “I need to talk to your mother for a second.”

He went into the kitchen, and the door swung shut behind him. He crossed his arms over his chest and said, “Justine.”

The red headed woman who had bothered to make herself attractive today turned around.

“My eyes almost fell out of my head when I saw Cody walk in with you,” she said.

“Does he ever talk about me?”

Justine put down the platter she was cleaning, “You and that Russell.”

“Did he ever give you our last name?”

“Eventually.”

“Then why didn’t you—”

“I didn’t see the point in all that.”

“But I... am....” Thom said now.

Justine nodded her head. “You are Cody’s dad.”

Thom didn’t say anything. More wrinkles appeared on his brow as he scowled, considering the whole situation and crossed his arms tighter around his chest. He rolled his tongue around in his mouth.

“I should probably explain,” Justine told him.

“That...” said Thom, “would probably be a good idea.”

“Let me take out the dessert and all that,” Justine said. “I’ll make some coffee. If we stay in here the kids’ll get suspicious and wonder what’s going on.”

Thom sighed and said, “Actually, it’s probably time for me to go.”

“Thom, you don’t have to. You need answers.”

He nodded.

“You’re right,” he said, “I kind of do.”

“It looks like it might snow tonight,” Russell rolled over and looked out of the window. There were no curtains and they only had the light of a little lamp in that room.

“It’s warm in here, though,” said Cody.

He pulled Russell to him, and spooned the long, tall, pale boy, smoothing his red hair with his hands.

“How do you feel?” he whispered to Russell.

“Better than I’ve felt in a long time. Like this was all I wanted, and everything else was just trying to get to it.”

Cody kissed him on his shoulder and contemplatively played with Russell’s hair.

“Exactly,” he said.

He said, reaching for the blanket and pulling if over them, “Do you want to stay the night here?”

Russell turned to him, wrapping his arms about Cody’s waist.

“Yes,” he said.