EXCURSUS
“I don’t understand why we can’t take a plane,” Flip Sanders said.
“Because I don’t like flying,” said Ross. “Because every time I do it, my ears pop. Every time I fly I’m on a crowded plane, shoulder to shoulder with sneezing motherfuckers, and then the stewardess stands up there and illustrates all the things we’re supposed to do to save ourselves, and it all flies out of my head and finally the plane goes up. It goes up and up and I think, holy shit! We’re really high, and then it gets higher and then we’re over clouds and last time I did it I saw the curve of the earth and blackness and that’s when I realized it just didn’t do to think about it, and all the shit that stewardess said… it didn’t matter. Because in the end, if something happened, we were definitely going to die.”
“Yes, and I side with that.” Jimmy Nespres was saying as he loaded the station wagon, “But the real reason for driving is because you can’t take five hundred grams of cocaine with you on a plane.”
“Do you really have…?” Flipper began. “Are you fucking serious?”
“Are we ready, guys?” Jimmy asked ignoring the question.
“I’ve been ready.” Ross said. “Is my back seat ready?”
“Backseat?” Jimmy said. “You’re shotgun. You’re in charge of the music. CDs are at your feet.”
“I’ll be the one chilling out in the back.”
“Why is that?” Ross wondered.
“Because Flip’s taste in music is terrible.”
“So I’m DJ the entire time?”
“You’re good at it, Ross. And I figure if Flip listens he can understand how the work of DJ is done.”
Flipper waved his fingers as he opened the backseat door and slid into the old station wagon.
“He says you’re a master.”
And this is how they began their trip out of Walter, Michigan. If they had been taking a plane, then they would have left with everyone else, but after consulting maps, Jimmy and Ross had decided it would take three days to reach Miami and that meant they should leave three days early.
“I’m glad I turned in my work before I left,” Ross reflected.
Jimmy looked panicked.
“You can do that?”
“Of course you can do that,” Ross said, flipping through CDs and putting the first one on. “What the hell did you do?”
The Jackson Five burst out doo whopping and Michael Jackson declared.
“Uh-huh, huh, huh
Just let me tell you now
Uh-huh
When I had you to myself,
I didn't want you around
Those pretty faces always made
you stand out in a crowd
But someone picked you from the bunch,
one glance was all it took
Now it's much too late for
me to take a second look.”
“I just… left and hoped they’d be cool with it.”
They pulled out onto the old road that north became the main road into town and south became the highway.
“People do it all the time.”
“Yes,” Ross noted as he rolled down a window and saw the woods to his left and the old cemetery to his right, “and those people fail and take the course next semester.”
At the look he saw on Jimmy’s face in the rearview mirror, Ross said, “Cheer up. I’m sure that won’t happen to you.”
“And if it does,” Flipper said, shades hiding his eyes while he leaned over Ross’s seat, “it’s too late to worry about it now.”
When they pulled out of Saint Alban’s College in Walter Michigan, the road north opened to a Wal Mart and a strip mall and wound through the town of Walter, but driving south they passed a thin stretch of woods revealing the ruins of an Indian school. The Normal School it had been called, and Ross often wondered about what horrors had gone on there, where little native children were taken and straightened out, made to speak English, punished for speaking their own tongues, where their braids were cut off so they could look like second rate white people instead of themselves. There was a lesson in this. Now and again Ross walked the cemetery across the road from those trees, traveling among the old graves and enjoying the silence, sometimes sitting down to light a Black and Mild and smoke, watching the trucks pass by on their travels.
Now he and Jimmy and Flipper were on their own journey. and farm fields stretched on either side, but he thought of the cemetery and wondered. He’d heard terrible things about what was done in the name of charity for the poor that America despised, that America had made poor, stories of convents filled with dead babies from girls who had fAllan pregnant and were taken in to lives of torture and shame. And he had heard the tales of Indian children, no the word Native didn’t do because they had been rendered Indian by then, they had been Indianed, as his ancestors had been niggered, and he wondered how many of those Indian boys and girls lay forgotten in that cemetery or on other nearby ground.
A good DJ does not dose off. A good DJ does not get lost in his thoughts,. A good DJ knows what’s going on with the driver and sets the tone for the car. Like, now the journey had just begun, and so you can play a whole CD though, even sneak what you like. Everyone talks about Alanis’s first CD, but no one has recognized the genius of the second. Jimmy will not either, but he can get away with playing every other song.
On those times when they are driving at night, in the dark, in a hurry, quick songs, fast songs, not necessarily great songs, songs we know the words to. When going over long stretches of roads, seventies easy songs like our parents used to listen to, summer breeze makes me feel fine. But not too long, you always have to keep the energy up. Today the journey is short. They’re only headed for Geschichte Falls.
In Geshichte Falls Anigel says, “I want to go to Florida too,” and the boys look at each other and then Ross says, “There’s no reason you shouldn’t. If you want, pack a bag and we’ll go.”
Geschichte Falls is home because, long after his mother has gone, there is always a place to stay. Chayne lives in the house on Curtain and even though Gil is gone to college, Anigel is living with his cousin Sharonda, down by the river. Jimmy’s cousins live here, and the Lewises have a huge house. Tonight they are upstairs in the large apartment over Balusik’s grocery story, where Anigel’s sister and brother in law live with their two toddlers, and even though the Balusiks are not relations, they know they’re all welcome to stay.
“I would pack that bag,” Anigel declares, “only I think it’s not for me. This trip, it’s for you.”
“That’s what Ross’s aunt said,” Flipper says. “Sort of.”
“She took a cigar and blew smoke all over us,” Jimmy said. “She waved dried herbs and spat on us and cracked an egg over Flipper’s head.”
No one laughs, not even John Balusik, the whitest boy they’ve ever seen, short, compact, bald shaven, merry eyed.
“Ross told us not to laugh,” Flipper said. “But laughter didn’t even cross my mind.”
As he took another chicken leg, Ross said, “We would have stayed with her, but Aunt Josette’s place can’t fit three grown men.”
“I’ll check on her,” Anigel said. She knew Ross worried for the old woman and was guilty for not spending enough time with her.
“We can check on her together. Tonight if you like?”
When dinner was coming to an end, John’s younger but bigger brother, Ralph, came up the stairs. He was bronze haired, suntanned, toothy and handsome with bright blue eyes, a real athlete in his senior year of high school, and when he came up he came up with:
“Cousin Russ!” Jimmy rose from the table and threw his arms around Russell Lewis.
“Goddamn—pardon my language.”
“A goddamn is perfectly excusable,” Caroline, Anigel’s sister said, pushing a hand through her black hair and standing up to get two more plates.
“Goddamn, you’re as big as me,” Jimmy shook his redheaded cousin by the shoulders.
“Bigger,” Ralph cuffed Russell on the head.
“Hey, all,” Russell sounded friendly, but a little shy.
“Flip,” he said.
“Russ,” Flip nodded to him.
Ross looked between Flipper and Russell, but said nothing, and Caroline said, “Sit on down. Sit down and eat.”
“I can’t believe you’re so big and tall,” Jimmy said while they were sitting on the back porch looking down on the yard. Below them the other yards and houses, two flats and three flats of Little Poland stretched out in the night, and Ralph said, “Russ, if you’re getting up,” because Russell was, “would you be a friend and get us some beers?”
Russell nodded, and Flipper was in the kitchen table, going through his book bag.
“Where are you all staying?” Russell asked.
“Probably at Chayne’s.”
“You all could have stayed with us,” Russell told him. “You know that. I mean, you still can.”
“Uh, I guess.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You know why.”
Russell let the fridge door close and set the tallboys on the table..
“Yeah.”
“How’s Cody?”
“Cody’s fine.”
“I mean, he’s like your thing now, right? Now that everything is cleared up.”
“He’s not my….” Russell stopped and took his hand through his hair.
“There you go again, doing your movie star thing.”
“Fuck off,” Russell said, lightly. “He’s not my thing. Being seventeen is my thing.”
“Yeah,” Flipper nodded. He closed his bookbag.
“Look, I am not blaming you. I am blaming myself. You are seventeen, and I am—”
“Not seventeen.”
Russell sat across from Flipper.
“I think people are waiting for their beer.”
“I think people will have to keep waiting,” Russell said.
Then he said, “I miss you.”
“I miss you too, Russ. But I don’t know what we were, which means I don’t really know what we are.”
“We’re friends.”
“And Cody?”
“I thought Cody was my fate. I thought he was a lot of things. I love him and everything, but maybe I don’t have a fate. Maybe I just like being me and loving my friends. Maybe... You know how people are talking about gay marriage. and it’s the year two thousand and things aren’t like they used to be.”
“Yeah,” Flipper shrugged. “Except for things are exactly how they used to be.”
“Maybe,” Russell said. “But I was just… confused about everything. I thought I’d be a virgin forever. I thought I’d be a priest. Then I thought I’d be with Jason, then I thought I was in love with Cody. And… I realized I love sleeping with guys. I just like boys, and I love my friends. I’m not really with anybody. And I’m kind of okay with that.
“Maybe I’m like Jimmy.”
“You’re not like Jimmy,” Flipper said. “You’re not tortured.”
“You know, I thought I wasn’t much of a writer, but I’ve been working on these poems, and I’ve been reading Flannery O’Connor. Not that she’s a poet, but—”
“Have you read Temple of the Holy Chost?”
“Fuck, yes, and her letters too.”
“She’s a little bit—”
“She’s a fucking racist,” Russell said.
“Yeah, she is.”
“I tried to excuse it, but she’s hateful as fuck, and there’s not really much of an excuse. She reminds me of folks at church who hate gay people—”
“Russ!” Ralph shouted.
“Fuck! The beers.”
The door opened.
“What the fuck?” Ralph demanded, pretending to smack him on the head, but his hand lingering in Russell’s hair as he smiled, winked companionably at Flipper and took the beers. Flipper watched Ralph heading out with the beers, then turned back to Russell.
“You still go to church, though?”
“I guess. I mean, I do.”
“How long do you think that will last?”
“The Church might change or I might change. Something will change.”
“You could become an Episcopalian.”
“Like you?”
Flipper took a beer, opened it and swigged.
“Fuck no, not like me. I never fucking go to church.”
“I’d go with you,” Russell said.
“When I get back let’s do that, then.”
Russell nodded.
“We’re not done, you and I,” Russell said like a grown up. Fuck, he was a grown up.
“Where were you earlier? With that guitar?”
“Practicing with my friends Brad and Nehru. I don’t know if you met them. They just had a baby. I mean, Brad had the baby, but I was there. At the Noble Red.”
“You talked about it.”
“We could go there?” Russell suggested. “Hang out. If you’d like?”
Flipper didn’t say anything. He just nodded.
