“You saw it?” Ross said.
“I saw it,” said Jimmy.
“That’s hardly your fault.”
“I didn’t do anything to stop it.”
“What the hell were you going to do?”
“I didn’t want him to stop it. I just wanted to watch. It turned me on.”
Ross said nothing. Flipper was well asleep in guestroom they’d found, and the two of them were sitting in the gallery over the church between the Vigils service and the next one in an hour. There was something very happy about the quiet of this place.
“I wanted to do it,” Jimmy said. “I used to get myself off. Thinking about it.”
“But you never did.”
“Once, at a party, and not only once, I would see girls passed out and I’d think, ‘I could do that. I could fuck her right now, come inside of her.’ Who thinks that?”
“Your cousin thought it.”
“But who—that’s the most evil thought.”
“But a thought was all it was. You didn’t do it.”
“But I wanted to. And last year, Amber. And so many other girls. I’ve done it to drunk girls. Enjoyed it. That’s the problem with me. There is something dirty in me.”
Ross didn’t think it would do any good to deny this.
“Dom used to…”
“Used to what.”
Jimmy shook his head.
“Never mind.”
“Dom used to what?”
“I don’t feel like talking about it,” Jimmy waved it off with his long hand, and his sandy hair fell in his face. Here, in the semi dark, where the only openings were from the monastery or from the guesthouse, and no one was coming, Ross was suddenly filled with a thrill.
“It’s the thing about me,” Ross said. “I’m not like other people.”
“No, you’re the most unlike other people I’ve ever known.”
“No,” Ross said, going to his kneeling and holding Jimmy’s knees as he looked into his face.
“What I mean is you thought about those girls… doing it to those girls...”
“Oh,” Jimmy started, eyes widening.
“You thought of it, but you wouldn’t do it. People have dreams, they have ideas that they never carry out. That isn’t me. That’s never been me. For me, to think it is to do it—”
“Oh, God, Ross!” Jimmy moaned.
“I’m just… id. All id… No ego. Absolute id,” Ross said.
“Fuck,” Jimmy sighed.
For, rather than pressing Jimmy about those girls or about Dom, in this not light of the barely lit chapel in Kentucky, between the Vigils and Lauds, the witching hour and sunrise, while Flipper still slept, Ross, remembering Chicago, remembering so much, and feeling no division between desire and doing, had slipped his hands into Jimmy’s joggers, and the whole time he had been stroking him, was now going to his knees. In those gallery pews where, should the door open, no one would see him, he knelt between Jimmy Nespres’s thighs and sucked on him, feeling his best friend’s cock harden, lengthen and swell in his mouth, feeling the compulsion and hunger that united them until, with equal relief, Jimmy buried his hands in Ross’s scalp and leaned back, pumping his cock gently into Ross’s mouth.
He’d been with Flipper a handful of times and Ross only in Chicago, and with both of his friends it had been like this, this desperation. Maybe it had always been like this for him, but there was never that connection. He knew all of him wouldn’t be accepted. He knew he wouldn’t be received. When he brought Ross up and kissed him hard, he knew Ross would kiss him back, take in all of this need. They weren’t trying to be wicked or daring. They knew they were unseen in that empty place, in the darkened stall at the time before God brought the sun up. In the darkness, they pulled off their clothes and tangled their bodies, kissing and sucking, licking, running their hands over each other in pleasure and, at last, Ross lay on the floor, splayed like a spider, and let Jimmy inside of him. They fucked quiet and hard, high and holy, and Jimmy grunted with surprise when he came, some poison leaving him as he ejaculated, some long hidden shame, spurting from his cock, shooting into Ross, becoming, as Jimmy’s body lifted and fell and trembled, as a great sensitive shaking moved through him, something else entirely.
Ross’s asshole ached. He squeezed it and felt Jimmy pulsing in him, felt Jimmy’s body across him, his mouth on his neck. Their clothes and the cold of the floor touched his cheek and Jimmy kissed the back of his head again and again.
“We should go, I suppose,” Ross said, at last.
The bells rang, calling faithful people to Lauds, but all three of them decided they were not those people.
“Mass,” Ross said, his mouth full of cotton. “We could do a mass.”
He got up to shower and came back into the room, naked an uncaring, and as he rubbed his body in cocoa butter, Jimmy loved Ross’s flesh, almost invisible in the dark with the pulled blinds. When Ross climbed back into bed, Jimmy clung to him, smelling him.
“I’m ruining your bath,” Jimmy said.
“Then go wash.”
And Jimmy did and when he came back he dressed and said, “I think I will go to Mass.”
“And I think I won’t,” Ross said from bed.
Flipper giggled.
“Two sentences I never thought I’d hear from the people speaking them.”
Jimmy was disappointed at first to go alone, but now he realized he needed that. There was something about being in this white painted chapel before the pure bleached wood and standing alone, not with parents or friends, before the mystery of the Eucharist as the sun rose. He almost felt holy. He felt high and grand and wonderful and unworthy of the white disk the priest raised to meet the morning. When they all went up for Communion, Jimmy only crossed his hands over his chest.
It was nearly breakfast time, and he went back to the room, but when he entered, Flipper was on his hands and knees on the bed, and Ross was fucking him while morning light filled the room. Ross’s body was red brown, and the muscles in his arms, and his round buttocks pulsed as he pressed himself inside Flipper who pressed against him. All of Jimmy’s body was hot, and his mouth dry, and he realized his holy feelings were all bullshit. He should have taken Communion. They worshiped the God of the Road, and the only Christ they knew as a man like them with dirty feet. Jimmy struggled out of his clothes while Ross slammed into Flipper and Flipper’s eyes crossed, his mouth closed. Jimmy leaned against the door, masturbating, tweaking his own nipples, and the same time Ross groaned and came inside of Flipper was the time when, in the little sacred room of the visitor’s house, before the passive icon of Jesus, Jimmy groaned and crumbled against the wall as he came for the second time in a few hours, the semen pumping out and over his fist. It was only half conscious he saw Ross draped limp over Flipper’s body as they spread out on the bed together, then Ross and Flipper, side by side in half sleep.
There was a buffet where the guests ate in silence, and no one asked who was a guest and who wasn’t. It was peaceful and there was oatmeal and croissants and all sorts of breakfast rolls, good cereal, even sausage and bacon, though the monks ate no meat. Jimmy had two cups of coffee, and when he was done, Flipper finished off his orange juice and followed him to join Ross who was on the porch smoking a cigarette.
“Wanna walk a bit?” Ross pointed to the hills beyond the monastery grounds.
“The hills are everywhere!” Flipper declared. “And I know that sounds stupid, and obvious, but… They are. And this world is so beautiful.
Ross was walking with a stick he’d found in branches under the row of oak trees at the monastery entrance, and Flipper pointed out trees and statues and hills with his cigarette as he walked ahead of them in jeans and a yellow and blue rugby shirt. They passed a lean to of green fiberglass where an old man lived with two donkeys, and later a trailer with an old woman. Ross assumed they were hermits. He thought, that’s a life I could like, and they traveled across an empty road and up into hills until they looked down on the valley and the white monastery with its great bell tower.
“It’s fucking beautiful,” Flipper declared.
“What if we never left. What if we just stayed here?”
“No, Ross,” Jimmy said. “Florida’s waiting. I mean, yeah, the hotel room we already paid for is waiting, but Florida’s waiting, and I’ve gotta fucking get to it.”
“I wasn’t serious, James,” Ross said, slipping an arm over his friends neck.
“I think you were,” Flipper said, smiling and touching Ross’s ass.
“A little.”
They drove slowly through Kentucky and Georgia, feeling at their ease and stopped in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Richard Sanders the Third had spent most of his life in the Midwest, but until he was five had lived near Bowling Green, Kentucky and was the mostly mystified and mildly embarrassed descendant of a long line of Episcopalian slave owners. While the various Sanders descendants had fAllan on harder times since the days of glory, they had never really fAllan on hard times. Mostly self aware, when Flipper returned South, it was his South, his home that people Up North knew so little about, and he took pride in its green and blue rolling hills, its huge stretches of trees, it resistance to winter, and yes, the quirks of its particular culture.
“There are some very interesting Civil War battle places here,” Flipper said, “and there are some very interesting ways of telling that history.”
While Ross chuckled.
Jimmy said, “Whaddo you mean?”
“I mean, Jimmy darling,” Flipper affected a southern accent, “we white people like to make ourselves nicer than we really were. Or are for that matter.”
There was a Chattanooga choo choo Inn, and it had a restaurant. They ate in the rail car and looked on the city, but they stayed at a motel.
On their way out of Tennessee, they stopped at a general store on an almost lonely ridge. Pine trees touched the sky and the drop below was to trees so green they were almost blue. The forest below sent up a mist and Flipper said, “It’s almost the Smoky Mountains.
“It’s almost cold as fuck,” Jimmy noted.
Flipper shrugged.
“That too.”
The store was wooden and old time and full of jerky and candy with a young man who had a light red beard and feed cap and he said, “Hello, yawl.”
And Flipper said hey back and Ross noticed that his southern accent was stronger, and they were shooting the shit and as Jimmy grabbed pops, Ross said, “What the fuck is that?”
Standing near as tall as Ross, sewed from cloth and stuffed like teddy bears were three mammy dolls, red dressed, red kerchiefed, white aproned, with black, triangular faces.
“Those are dolls,” said that man.
“Um,” Ross said.
“I hadn’t even noticed that shit,” Jimmy said by way of apology.
“It don’t mean nothing,” the boy at the counter said. “It’s just heritage.”
“Yup,” Ross said in that same voice.
“It really don’t mean nothing. I know a lot of really decent, smart colored people. I ain’t racist or nothing.”
“I know you don’t mean it,” Ross said, going to the refrigerator to pull our three long neck sodas, “and it’s too late and I’m too tired to teach you better, so I’m just going to be buy these.”
As he handed over his money, suddenly Ross kicked off his shoes, hiked up his jeans, took one of the straw hats for sale, stuck it on his head and burst out singing in his corniest hillbilly accent:
“For real country sausage, the best you’ve ever tried
Pick up a pound or two of Tennessee Pride!”
“Wow,” was all Jimmy said, but he noticed, to his amusement, the storekeeper and Flipper were considerable redder.
Ross continued:
“Its real country sausage, yessirree
The secret of the goodness is the re-ci-pe!”
And then his voice shifted to an old man’s country accent and he sang:
“Well we start with fresh meat,
its real grand
Pure whole hog pork,
the best in the land
We add a dash of X and a pinch of Z for flavor
And we add Y9D
A touch of Odom’s magic blends all three
And that’s the secret of the recipe!”
When he was done, he put the hat back on its rack, slipped his shoes on and approached the counter.
“Howabout you take those on the house, sir,” the storekeeper said, putting the bottles in a bag.
“You like Toblerone?” he pointed to the triangular candy.
“I like them just fine.”
The man put three in the bag.
“You have a good day, sir.”
“You too,” Ross said.
Also, he added before leaving, “The word is Black. Not colored. It’s been that way for a while. And don’t be confused by those people saying Afro and African Americans. Africans come from Africa and Afros were a hair style. Colored…” Ross shook his head and winked.
“No.”
Back in the car no one said anything until Jimmy burst out laughing, and then Ross laughed and the two of them cackled while Flipper shook his head and said, “I’ve never been so embarrassed to be born in Tennessee in my life.”
“Ma loif!” Jimmy and Ross both echoed as they drove the narrow mountain road.
“Shut up,” Flipper reached into the backseat and hit Ross.
Opening up his Toblerone, Ross said, “We add a dash of X and a pinch of Z for flavor. And we add Y9D! I’m just surprised that there was a time when you could make a song that told people the food you produced was full of chemicals.”
“Do you think they call them hillbillies,” Flipper began, “cause there are so many hills around here?”
Ross was half asleep in the back of the car and Jimmy was driving. He didn’t answer, and Flipper just said, “Yeah, that must be it.”
“We should be in Georgia soon,” Jimmy said, as if Flipper had never spoken.
“I think I hate Georgia,” Ross said. “Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi.”
“Well, lucky for you we’re only going through Georgia,” Jimmy said.
“What’s so bad about Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi?” Flipper asked. “I mean, what’s so great about em, sure. But what’s so bad about them?”
“I’m Black,” Ross said, simply.
“Okay, I wasn’t like why wouldn’t a Black guy want to be in Alabama,” Flipper said.
“It actually sounded like you were,” Jimmy pointed out.
“What I meant was, why those three states in particular? I mean, We’ve been through Kentucky and we’re almost out of Tennessee.”
“Georgia and Alabama just seem more slavy,” Ross said. “Besides, half my family had to flee Georgia.”
“Are you serious?” Jimmy said.
“Very.”
“We did see that a photo of that old sign,” Flipper said, “and it was in Indiana.”
“No Negroes After Dark,” Ross said, because no one else did.
“The very one.”
“I mean, they took it down,” Jimmy said, “but still, it was up in the first place, and I don’t think they got rid of it till just a few years ago.”
“I’d like to think they just forgot to take it down,” Flipper said.
“I’d like to think so too, Richard Sanders,” Ross said. “But to have the luxury of forgetting means the sign was effective, cause when we passed through there was only one Black person there, and he was sitting in this car acting as DJ.”
Ross fell asleep, and when he woke up they were in Georgia. They were still among the hills.
Ross stretched and murmured, “It is beautiful. I can’t deny that.”
“We should stop somewhere and eat.”
Ross remembered stories from his grandparents of having to drive through the south with chicken and sandwiches in paper bags, not able or not daring to stop at most restaurants and reliant, sometimes, on a little green book that told them where they were welcome and where they weren’t. So he wanted to suggest, powerfully, that they go through a drive thru and keep pushing. He was almost resentful that his friends were so casual about going to eat. This was the Georgia where the Klan had abducted Civil Rights workers, white ones, murdered young white men and women and never faced justice. This South was the land of Emmett Till, face ruined, dead at fourteen for smiling at a bitch of a white woman. And the bitch still lived today.
In the restaurant, no one looked at him askance, and there even several other Black people. It was like the past had never happened. Everything here surprised him. The waitress called him darling. He kept waiting for something to happen, but it was Jimmy who said, “Is it just me, or is this place more like Michigan than Southern Indiana was? I mean, in Southern Indiana I felt like even I wasn’t white enough.”
“Well, yes, that’s it,” Ross realized.
“It probably has to do with the fact that we’ve always been here,” Ross observed. “They’re used to us.”
He’d heard other Black people talk about how much they missed the South, how much it was home, how white people in the north didn’t understand things, and even the Black people up North didn’t understand either. He’d always wondered how anyone could want to go back to the house of bondage. As the burger arrived and the woman said, “There you go, sugar,” he was starting to understand.
They ordered the chocolate cream pie. Ross never had dessert. This evening it was the best damn thing he’d ever had, but his mind was still on Georgia. It seemed nice. Atlanta was supposed to be the new Black capital. Maybe the South wasn’t so racist. Or was it that the whole country was racist too?
When Ross and Jimmy went to pay, the round faced blonde waitress said, “Honey, you all look tired. You’d better get some rest. Yawl from around here?”
“We’re from Michigan,” Ross said. “On our way to Miami.”
Jimmy said, “My friend was worried because he hasn’t been to the South and he thought it might be… you know…”
“Racist?” the waitress said, taking the money and totaling up the bill.
“Dangerous?” she raised an eyebrow to Jimmy.
“Yeah,” Jimmy said, chewing his gum.
Ross looked around and said, “Everyone’s getting along. It’s like the past never happened.”
The waitress touched Ross’s hands.
“Because you are here. It’s in the hills and past the trees. You ain’t stupid. Atlanta and the cities are one thing, but in other places the past ain’t never gone away. Be careful, friend and don’t let your Yankee friends tell you different.”
