6.
RETROSPECT
After he had been asked enough times if he was-- sometimes it was nice, but usually it wasn’t--Ross Allan began to suspect it was true. It answered his own questions about the obvious difference he felt between himself and everyone else, about how, though sex excited him in the abstract, he could not pair it with any girl he’d known and still be excited. You could not live in the Midwest and not hear about what was wrong with you, and that would have been true even in public school, but in Catholic school, and more from the Christian radio station, Ross began to piece together exactly what the demon was that haunted him.
Things were rarely explicitly spoken, only hinted. because even to say a thing out loud was to bring temptation. As a young teenager, his wild weekend nights consisted of making coffee and turning on the Christian radio station. Up until the year they’d finally made a Christian rock station in town, his only chance to hear young people Christian music, to hear from young Christians, was when the Moody Bible Institute ran their Saturday Night Alive program. That was when he came in contact with a world of Christians out there like him, people who loved Jesus and wanted to be different from the rest of this dead world.
And he would have called it a dead world. If there was a principal he associated with sin, it was this deadness that hung around his mother, his father, everyone he knew, this boredom and anger, this sort of blindness to the beauty around them. And, he admitted sometimes the beauty was hard to see.
Ah, but when the Christian radio station came, then on Sunday nights there were all sorts of shows for the youth, including call in shows, and it was here that he learned the complex language of sins. There was a girl who had lost her virginity, but she prayed to Jesus and became a virgin all over again, and when people saw her at school they just couldn’t believe she wasn’t a virgin because she was filled with so much joy. And there were boys who called in to confess that they hadn’t waited till marriage to be chaste, that they had given up their innocent gift. The host of the show, listening to one boy go on about this said, “But don’t you think it’s worse for girls?”
This blindness to whatever the boy was going through was so startling that Ross marked it as one of the last times he would listen to this show.
“Uh, I guess. But I feel really bad for not waiting and—”
“But it’s worse for a girl,” the radio pastor continued, “because, like, you have to be penetrated. You have to be opened.”
The boy on the other end of the phone had been as wordless as Ross.
“My friend and I, we’re both guilty of this … sin. Right? And now we hold each other accountable. We’re like, are you still doing it? Are you still doing it? And that’s how we stopped.”
Even at seventeen, even before his late to arrive hormones had kicked in, Ross Allan knew they were talking about masturbating.
One night Pam Thumb was singing “No shadows, No doubts!” and talking about leaving her sin at the door and Ross Allan felt triumphant because he was leaving his sin at the door. God gave everyone crosses, his greatest saints the greatest crosses, and Ross knew his cross, his burden, his struggle. He named it. He whispered it. He thanked God for it. Tears nearly went down his face.
Two years later in junior college, he picked up Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. He read it in a day and wept like it was the Gospel. The ending sucked. He would be angry at the ending eventually, but the love and the lust in the pages of Baldwin stayed with him. In the early part of the book, the narrator talked so tenderly about making love to another boy and Ross read the pages over and over again. What a strange book, maybe one where Baldwin was divorced from himself, for he told it first person, but that person was white. Everyone in the book was white as if he, much like Ross, could not synthesize queerness and color.
That same summer he stole the movie Priest from Blockbuster video because when Linus Roache took Robert Carlisle home and made love to him, Ross actually cried, when the priest penetrated his lover, and later, when his mouth opened in orgasm, when his hands kneaded Carlisle’s back, something welled up in Ross. It wasn’t simply lust. His body had taken a long time to mature, and he’d had his first orgasm watching Christian Slater as a monk fuck a prostitute in The Name of the Rose. The feeling he was left with now was sacred. He knew what he was, and what he loved.
When he started to look for more books more movies like that, when he became suddenly liberal and impatient, right before going to Saint Alban’s, his friend Meredith said, unkindly, “Do you want to fuck a dude or what?”
But he didn’t. Or, at least, that was not all he wanted to do, and he could not explain it, so he thought he would talk to only people who could understand, and so far that equaled up to a grand total of nobody.
In the last days when his mother was alive, he went to stay with his aunt, in her old apartment crowded with saints, holy books and candles. She had come from Chicago, and still lived like it on the far south side of Geschichte Falls, the area of three flats and old factories that ran into East Sequoya and was called Little Poland. There were two old Catholic churches, Saint Casimir’s and Saint Mary’s, who occupied opposite ends of the sky from the spare bedroom where Ross stayed at his grandmother’s. Their bells rang every hour, and here Ross experienced something of religion he had never known.
His great aunt was originally from Louisiana it was said, though she never spoke of it, and every night she prayed the rosary. Hers was of blue glass beads on a silver chain with a silver crucifix, and she murmured those prayers before her little paintings.
“What you want to know?” she asked Ross.
“Is that Mary,” he said, looking curiously at the beautiful black woman. He’d seen something like her in the church, but whiter, Mary walking over the waves, her hands stretched out. But here, Mary’s tangled black hair hung down her back, and she did not have that blue mantle or the baggy dress, but a shimmering gown fit to a very… feminine,,, Ross settled on the word, body.
His aunt, dark with three gold teeth and two small hoops in each ear, smiled. She was never rough, though her speech and her accent made it seem so.
“If you need her to be, Ross. If you need it.”
In her room and all through the house were candles before statues of saints that were not quite saints. Ross could not explain. They were usually black for one thing, sometimes absolutely black, and some of them were completely unrecognizable. Like, Lazarus he knew, and Saint Peter. But who was the warrior shooting his bow into the sky? Who was this man in the green skirt with a machete? And there were herbs that she burned, and there were days when they traveled a few blocks for the right candles or for a strand of colored beads, coming into old shops which, at first, seemed like Catholic bookstores, but upon even minimal inspection, were certainly more.
Before the picture of the woman walking across the waves, his aunt prayed:
O Yemaya, guardian of the seas and all souls!
I come to you for protection.
Guide me and guard me against harm’s way.
Let your wisdom bring safety to my path as
I journey through life.
Protect my loved ones, family, friends, and foes alike
from the danger that could befall them.
Bless obstacles within our paths with peace & understanding
while standing against the evil intentions of those
who oppose us with strong walls of defense.
Let me turn to you when I feel in times of danger
or despair so that you may lighten the load
on our shoulders and restore peace within our lives.
All praise goes to You, O Yemaya,
Queen, Mother, and Protector!
This was how Ross learned about the world that was bigger and richer than the one he had known, which cradled you like a bear with an engine of a stomach and sharpened teeth. This is how he learned what some people called magic.
This was the time that he wandered across the street into East Sequoya and Saint Mary’s Church. Up until then Mass was a sad event because church was for families and his family never went. He felt excluded from the fun and the folk guitars. He actually almost wanted to cry, The church was one way on TV and in movies, but quite another in real life. He was full of these weird and heavy emotions and never felt at home. But here, today, he felt home at daily Mass amid the pillars, the marble communion rail, the old white and grey haired Catholics, some of them young but hard bitten. He felt at home around the grottoes lit by red votives where, in compassion, the saints stood keeping quiet watch. On the far south end, in his loneliness, in those weeks swirling around his mother’s death and his growing decision to travel to Walter and finish his education, he met and came to love the dark Jesus, the traveler of night roads.
“This is how you make offering to Exu,” Aunt Gina said.
“Go to a crossroads, a four way crossing will do. At each corner take these candies, or something else sweet—not some shit like oranges and fruit, but sweet stuff that kids want—and hold them, move them around and ask Exu for health, prosperity, protection, peace. And then drop the candies at each corner. Do it for three corners, because his number is three. And then at the last ask him for what you truly want, what you need. In faith, turn around and walk away, and whatever you do, don’t look back.”
Coming to Walter, Michigan was lonelier than he expected. And even when he met people, they didn’t seem quite right. Macy and Bernadette were fun, but there was something missing from them. Then, on almost the same day he met Jimmy and Flipper, something electric went through him. Later, when he could laugh at himself more, diagnose what was fucked up about him, Ross would admit this was because they were the saddest men he’d ever met, and something about their sadness drew him.
This was why, one night, when Ross was walking back from doing the Exu offering near Justin Hall, and he bumped into Flip Sanders, he invited him in.
Ross was not sure if he was trespassing when he brought buffalo wings to Flip Sanders, but everybody loved buffalo wings, and he was coming to see he loved Flipper. His popular friend had been through a hard year that ended even harder, and those last days of the school year they sat together in the approaching night and ate in silence. Flipper was in baggy cargo pants and a grey tee shirt with a cigarette tucked behind his ear and he said, “Chicken really does make things better.”
“Black people have been trying to share this news for centuries,” Ross said.
“You know it was almost me,” Flipper said after a while.
“Huh?” Ross started. And then he felt like he knew, and there was no need to ask more questions.
“All I could think,” Flipper said, “is that it was almost me.”
He was referring to Noah Aukraker, the football player. Ross didn’t know him at all, because this had been his first semester at college, and he didn’t know who was popular, who wasn’t and who played what sport. He had been eager to move into the silence of the senior dorm and get away from all that.
Somewhere around two weeks ago, people began to report that Noah Aukraker was missing. His parents had come up. Questions were asked, though not to Ross. They held a pointless vigil, or maybe it wasn’t pointless, but it seemed to have been fruitless. The semi religious on a good day Catholic campus met at the old Grotto, one of many Midwestern knock offs of the cave where the Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Bernadette. Unlike the more famous grotto in Notre Dame, Indiana, this contained many small caves, was of red stone, and was barely ever used, except, Ross suspected, for smoking pot and fucking. They’d all gathered there with candles in little cups and prayed corny prayers. They sang Catholic hymns badly, and then departed, Ross wondering if maybe he was too harsh, too cold, too mean spirited, and hoping that one day he might be a little less judgmental, wondering if his hard heart made it harder for the prayers to get out. He hoped Noah was found safe. It didn’t seem likely, but he hoped.
So the story went, two weeks ago there had been a party in Gallyhoo, he had punched a hole in the glass of the north exit stair. and he had screamed, punched a hole in the north exit stair, disappeared into the dark and never been seen again.
Then, in the very last days of the year, as folks were packing to leave for the summer, the news had leaked out, not shouted in the same way as Noah’s missing. Noah had been found by the lake was the first passive statement, and then unless anyone needed it spelled out, he was found dead. He had been dead for a while, probably dead long before they’d held the vigil, probably, some said from the looks of him, dead since that night when he had disappeared, which made sense if you thought about it.
Those who were really in the know learned that he had been discovered by Andy Lagger, another football player, handsome, a little rugged, blue eyed, brown haired, soft spoken, an avid fisherman. He had cast his lure near the reeds around Lake Lourde, and had instead found Noah Aukraker. Some reports said he was with someone else, and some said that he had run directly to get someone else, another friend. For this Ross had the horse’s mouth, or the friends mouth, because Andy Lagger was the sometimes boyfriend of Flip Sanders, and Flip had been that someone else. What was more, Flipper told Ross what no one else ever heard.
“People wanted to make it look like a drowning,” he said dispassionately. “When I saw him he looked terrible. I mean, how could he not? But he wasn’t bloated. What happens to a drowned body is so wild. He wasn’t drowned, and I was so fucked over it I wondered if he’d been eaten by alligators before I remembered we were in fucking Michigan. You see, his face was mostly gone. And then we found the gun. We didn’t touch any of that. Andy almost did, but I told him not to.”
The police and the coroner came and went. If the parents came to clean out his room, they did that quickly too. On the last night of that school year Ross sat up with Flipper and he said, “When you said that was almost you...?”
“It’s been such a fucking year,” Flipper said. “I’m not going to hide that I wanted to kill myself.”
After some silence, Flipper said, “If it had to be someone I’m glad it was Noah. He was a miserable fuck. I never did like him. Not really.”
