When He Remembers Joy

Paul does not always like to look in the mirror. In fact, he rarely does. Sometimes Kirk takes him by the chin and gives him a look that lets him know how his lover of so many years feels. Often Paul remembers the man he became for so long, the one he did not like.

When he ran away from home, he was gone five years. The first time he returned was because Mom had cancer. He stayed for three weeks. One night, at the house, he sat across from an overly talkative nurse in white name Michael who droned on about cell counts and improvements and medicines while Paul’s head bobbed up and down.

“I guess,” Paul said, running a hand over his mouse like mouth, “I just need to get a hold on exactly what Mom has. Or had.”

“Well the lymphatic system is part of the body's immune defense system. Its job is to help fight diseases and infection. The lymphatic system includes a network of thin tubes that branch, like blood vessels, into tissues throughout the body. Lymphatic vessels carry lymph, a colorless, watery fluid that contains infection-fighting cells called lymphocytes. Along this network of vessels are small, bean-shaped organs called lymph nodes. Clusters of lymph nodes are found in the underarms, groin, neck, chest, and abdomen. Other parts of the lymphatic system are the spleen, thymus, tonsils, and bone marrow. Lymphatic tissue is also found in other parts of the body, including the stomach, intestines and skin. Does that make sense?”

“Uh, yeah,” Paul said.

“Like all types of cancer, lymphoma cancers are diseases of the body's cells. Healthy cells grow, divide and replace themselves in an orderly manner. This process keeps the body in good repair.And—”

Suddenly, Paul placed his hand in Michael’s crotch. The obviously gay boy looked at him in surprise and Paul, going from frightened, to predatory, began to massage him.

“What else?” Paul continued, rubbing the boy into arousal as his sister and brother sat watching television in the next room.

“Uh…” Michael tried, “In the non-Hodgkin's lymphomas, cells in the lymphatic system grow abnormally… They… they divide too rapidly and…oh! They… they… grow without any order or control. Too much tissue is formed, and tumors begin to grow. The cancer cells can also spread to—”

Paul stood up, suddenly, and barked, “I’m walking Michael to his car. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

A few minutes later, a car headed up the road, briefly illuminating the area behind the old barn of the Anderson farm. Rock and roll music drifted across the fields and then was soon gone. Above, the moon was only a crescent, with a wedge of hard white light that, nevertheless, failed to pierce the darkness. All was quiet except for the sound of crickets, and a thumping against metal, a frustrated grunting as, jeans down around his ankles, Paul pressed the nurse Michael’s face into the side of his car, and his arm around his throat in a choke hold, fucked him. The Paul Anderson who lived in East Carmel was frail, awkward, out of control and scared. As Michael whimpered and Paul, ass clinched, cock wedged deep inside of him, rose on the balls of his heels in triumphant orgasm, his neck muscles straining, he realized it was easier to be somewhere and someone else.

But back to the year when Kyle Norman went missing. When his picture showed up on the news, Paul remembered his friend, the beautiful bronze boy who lived in Rummelsvile. Kyle had seemed so happy, so untouchable, so beautiful. Now Paul looked at the picture of the copper haired track star, and learned that his mother had abandoned him and his siblings with a stepfather who hadn’t even reported him missing. Had Kyle turned to track to outrun his bullshit the way Paul had? Had he taken Kurt with him, or had they fallen apart too?

“He had the sense to leave,” Paul said. “I ought to leave too. He knew this place would kill him.”

He thought of Kyle on his way to California, having the sense to get out of Rummelsville before the place ate him up. Or maybe he’d only gone to South Bend. Whatever helped.

I hope you’re okay, man. In that hotel room they had both revealed themselves to each other. Kyle had heard him come. Later, after they had laughed in the dark, they’d gotten up together, naked, to wash the come off their bodies. Paul felt so tender for that moment of seeing another boy like himself, sharing that bathroom, neither of them having to explain what had happened. He remembered the glance they had shared. Paul ached to talk to him again. Maybe soon, maybe wherever the track star popped up, Paul would get there too. At any rate, he had to get out of here.

Paul’s mother said nothing when his grades dropped, though years later she reflected that she ought to have said a little. Abandoned by a husband she realized had really left her years ago, her life was in shock at the time as well.

Paul was in the car one day with Claire and Matty, taking them to… the shoe store? That sounds about right… when he saw two cars side by side like something from a drag race movie, and he heard someone shouting, “Faggot!”

It had been so long since the last time anyone had called him that, he did not fear for himself, but he paid attention to who was being yelled at.

“Put your heads down,” Paul said to his siblings, his adrenaline rising. The car in front of him zoomed faster and the one beside it went immediately behind as the red light commanded Paul to stop.

“Are we gonna help those people?” Claire demanded.

“You’re going to stay in the car,” Paul said. “Both of you.”

He got impatient with the light, looked for cops, and then crossed Buren Avenue, gunning his engine to catch up with the cars. He drove up and down blocks for about five minutes before he found the cars, parked his, and crossed the street to the house with the open door. He stopped for a moment, looking around the front yard and then, finding a metal pipe, took it and went into the house. He heard the kicking and stomping before he saw it.

“You’re a fucking faggot. Admit it. You goddamn faggot.”

“I got a kid!” the man wailed as they beat him. “I’m married!”

Just like that, Paul slammed the pipe on the first man’s head and the other stopped in mid-kick, terrified.

“Get the fuck out!” Paul bellowed, beating him. He was possessed by a demon. With his pipe he was beating the two of them, chasing them out of the house, and it wasn’t until they were well gone, Paul turned to the man whose jaw was a bloody mess and whose blood was in a pool all around his floor.

“Wyman!”

There was no time to ask anything or be afraid. He called 911, and an ambulance was there not nearly quick enough to take him to County Hospital. Paul followed behind with Claire and Matty, and from the hospital he called his mother, commenting, “The hospital closes at nine! Whoever heard of a hospital that closes? I hate Jasper County. This place is barbaric.”

Merilee came to the hospital to take the kids, but Paul stayed in the dim waiting room, and the whole world was dim. He watched the news and they reported that what police believed to be the body of seventeen year old Kyle Norman had been found headless, in a reservoir outside of Rummelsville, and his stepfather had been brought in for questioning.

It was late that night when Wyman’s wife came in.

“You’re him,” She said.

“Huh?”

“You saved him,” She said. Paul had never known Her name.

“It was my brother who did it,” She reported. “The doctor told me over the phone Wyman’s probably gonna have a steel jaw.

She asked Paul:

“Were you fucking him?”

“What?”

She looked at Paul, eyes narrowed. He thought, what a fucking hillbilly! Then he thought, we’re all fucking hillbillies. I’ve gotta get Claire away from this place.

“You weren’t,” she said. “I didn’t think anyone was. I was just so mad. He’s awake now. Do you want to go see him?”

Paul nodded. He rose slowly.

Wyman’s face was so swollen and his eyelids were fat pillows. He was covered in stitches and nothing like the beautiful boy Paul had shared his life with a year before. He was married with a fat, nasty wife and in laws who were probably in the Klan, and he’d just get her pregnant again next year. He was a hillbilly.

“Paul,” Wyman croaked. “Paul.”

Wyman burst into tears and Paul sat there, awkwardly, as Mrs. Wyman walked into the hospital room. Paul could only pat Wyman’s shoulder and sit beside his bed.

All the next day Paul Anderson was desolate. He sat in his room until he realized he was thinking about death too much, and then he went running until he was out of town and his legs ached and his butt cramped and his arms were on fire. His lungs burned and it took him till evening to get home. That night, on the news, they reported that, having followed Kyle Norman’s stepfather’s lead, the police had gone to a ditch and found Kyle Norman’s head, obscenities carved into it by a pen knife. The next morning, Paul opened the Chicago Tribune, which had no problem with niceties and plainly stated that Kyle was gay and that his stepfather had possibly molested and then killed him and, before sawing the boy’s head from his body, had carved into his forehead in sharp capitals, the word: FAGGOT.

Just like that, Paul got up. He packed two bags and got the little money he had. He couldn’t wait till his mother got out of work or the kids got back from school. There would never be a better time. He had to get the fuck out of this place.

He went to the truck stop and caught the Greyhound that would take him to Gary. From Gary he would go to Chicago and from Chicago he would go as far west as he could.

Every time Paul heard about a runaway, his heart sank. He remembered his own running away. He remembered getting on that bus and going to the place he had wished Kyle Norman could have gone, rushing out of the county as if to outrun Kyle’s fate and Wyman’s fate, one’s head chopped off, the other’s head bashed in. He could still see Kyle in track competitions, hair bronze in the sunlight, his long legs and strong thighs golden. The triumphant smile on his face. Even though Paul lost to him, he didn’t feel like a loser. He remembered Kyle’s arm flung over him, congratulating him, and in the end, the certainty he and Wyman felt that they shared something with Kyle, and with his boyfriend Kurt. Well, then how could someone so beautiful and so free be trapped by that horrible man and that worthless mother, and how could his life end the way it had?

As they rolled out of the dirty bus station in Chicago, Paul’s mind pushed toward the image of Kyle, corpse thrown away, his head rotting in trash behind the house. But this image was hidden in darkness, and his mind refused to see it. Paul fell asleep, dreaming about Kyle, and Kyle turned into Wyman and then Kyle again.

That afternoon they came to the first transfer in Saint Louis, and the bus Paul was on was late, and so he had to remain in the depot for three terrified hours. He couldn’t allow himself to think about what he had done, and if he had not spent most of his money, he would have gone back to Indiana. The next transfer was in Las Vegas, and when he stepped outside there was a burning dry heat he had never known, and so he went back in, thinking the place looked blown and dried out, and in some ways like Indiana. Except for the mountains. Those mountains, black and streaked in white, were above all the shit, touched only by clouds and maybe by God. There was no long delay here, and he got on the third bus which brought him to LA. At the bus station, like an idiot, he had asked for a ticket to California, and the ticket manager, with the patience reserved for a retarded child, explained he actually needed a more specific destination.

“Hollywood!” Paul shouted, and patiently, the ticket manager had said, “L.A.”