Works and Days

The Gift of True Light

2

Barrelon was a college town and, as they entered, Russell could see the wide, silent football field of the university. Here were the apartments and dormitories of people who lived the experience he considered only to be an extension of high school and the next limb shooting out into that ridiculous bullshit his unhappy elders referred to as the real world.

The dorms were under and over all the hills. The hills were overgrown with what Russell assumed was, during the day, rich greenery. Between those hills were the houses of Barrelon’s citizenry, which was mainly university staff and university students. Past a bar on the corner, at one such house, a white bungalow on a small rise amidst other bungalows on the same rise, was where the van stopped.

“You sure that’s it, man?” Strogue said.

“I know where my own sister lives.”

The bungalow was jumping with noise and preppy white boys in smooth, fitted tee shirts tucked primly into their blue jeans were coming in and out with beer kegs and liquor.

“Well, here’s the party.”

As Bobby shut off the van, his hand made a grand gesture to the picture outside of their window.

“I didn’t know we were gon be partyin’ with a bunch of white folks,” Aaron started., then, turning to Russell said, “No offence meant.”

“None taken,” Russell replied, and eyed Gilead, who shrugged.

“Shit,” said Treshon, “it’s them white folks that got all the shit you want to party with. I heard this one dude talkin’ about how you take this pill and it makes you hear colors and see crazy shit.”

“Acid?” D.L. raised an eyebrow as they got out of the van, and Russell carefully unfolded his legs from under himself, and waited for them to regain feeling. “You can’t get me to fuck with no acid. That’s for white folks.”

“’Scuse me, man.” this from one white boy with a crew cut carrying in a case of beer as he bumped into Gilead, going up the brick stairway.

The house got louder and louder as they approached, and Russell was more and more frightened, though he felt his legs moving in glib negligence of his heart.

“Let’s the two of us stick together,” Gilead either suggested or commanded. It didn’t matter. Russell was more than happy to oblige his friend.

Once in the house they were lost to all but each other. Russell was steered by Gilead’s hand in his back as they maneuvered about the milling crowds. For a while they attempted to stay with Bobby and the group until Bobby and the group were lost to them, and then, suddenly they heard, “Bobby, what the fuck are you doing here!”

Gilead and Russell turned around into what was probably usually a living room.

“You said there was a party.”

Quiet descended, and before Bobby appeared a girl—a woman—who made Bobby Reyes seem like a child.

“I said, Roberto Gabriel Reyes—” this icy voiced woman must have been the sister, “that my roommates were having a party. Not, ‘I’m having a party so bring all your little—” she slapped Aaron on the back of his head, “knot headed friends here.”

“He’s in high school?” whined one white girl incredulously as she climbed off of D.L.’s lap.

Bobby, sounding hurt said, “If you want us to go—”

“No,” said Bobby’s sister. “You drove all this way. I’m not gon have you turn all the way back around. But don’t mess with any crazy shit floating around here.”

“So yawl are sophomores in high school?” said one boy they thought was named Eric. Gilead was sure he was mixed.

“I’m a junior,” Gilead said. “Russell is a sophomore up in Geschichte Falls.”

“Oh, I got a friend from up there,” the white girl, Jenean, said. She had pale hair and glasses and a cigarette hanging between her lips. Russell couldn’t tell if she and Eric were friends or friends and then some. “She went to this high school called Rosary.”

“Yeah, that’s our sister school,” Gilead told them. “We go to Our Lady of Mercy.”

“That’s straight,” Eric said. “I went to Catholic school. I don’t know what made me wanna come to Barrelon.”

“Me,” Jenean said plainly, and Eric broke into a grin and said, “Girl, you crazy! And the friend you’re talking about, Jenean? That’s Anigel. These guys came with Anigel’s brother.”

“Who?” started Russell.

“Bobby,” Eric said. He pointed to Bobby’s sister. “Her name is Anigel. Like angel.”

“She’s no angel,” Jenean laughed.

“Is she always so mean?” Russell asked in as small a voice as he could use in this loud place.

“Always mean?” Jenean said. “Shit, she’s never mean. She’s like cool as fuck!”

“You all have classes with her?” Russell asked.

“Aw, Anigel’s not in college.” This from Eric. “She works at the curio store a few blocks away. And she writes poetry and shit. She just lives with Greg and Patti. They go to school here. She and Shawn live here. The four of them, but only two in school—”

“Dude,” they heard some cry in the background, “some of the good shit—”

They turned around to see a big, ungainly white dude sitting around the dining room table with some other folks in black. He took out a glass vial, emptied out some white stuff, then, in an instant, snorted it up his nose.

“Holy shit, we’ve gotta go,” Jenean declared, and Eric, nodding, told Russell and Gilead, “Yawl need to get your friends and get the hell out. It’s getting serious here, and the police’ll wanna crack down on this shit.”

“They’ll come?” Gilead said.

“They always do,” Eric said.

Russell was still in shock, and he was nodding rapidly as he looked at the folks snorting, and began to smell something burning. Gilead was pulling him about the house, looking for D.L. or Bobby or Strogue or anyone when Russell asked him what the burning smell was.

“Bud,” Gilead pronounced, and when he was sure that Russell did not know this term he said, “Weed.”

Gilead was dragging Russell by the wrist, looking desperately for someone they’d come with when he saw Ralph Balusik—whom he would have gladly left to be arrested— standing by a pantry doorway, grinning idiotically while, now and again, he peaked inside.

“Ralph!” Gilead started.

“Shush!” Ralph warned, “I’m keeping guard.”

“Over?” Gilead said.

“Jason,” Ralph hissed and pointed into the pantry.

Russell heard it before Gilead looked into the darkness. Russell’s eyes adjusted to the profile of Jason, in the back of the pantry, his trousers down around his ankles, his white boxers around his knees, fucking some girl, her legs rising to encompass his waist, falling, rising up again as he drove himself steadily into her and she cried out in light pants. Russell could not stop looking. There was fierce concentration and loveliness on Jason’s handsome face, a light trickle of sweat. The girl’s hands were pushing frantically through his black curls. Her pale hands were pulling up his shirt, reaching down to caress his ass. Russell saw his ass.

His dick was hard.

Russell felt himself breathing harder, and was embarrassed to realize Ralph was right beside him, watching.

Jason’s grey-green eyes turned to them, while he was fucking, looked fiercely on Russell while the girl moaned, and Russell felt all of himself turn red, felt the erection wither. Where was Gilead?

“Ey, Lewis, you like?” Jason’s voice was cruel as if he had caught Russell and not the other way around. “Watch this, Lewis.”

Grunting, Jason moved the girl at a ninete dregree angle so he was faced them, roughly put his hand to her face so she was turned away from him, and then, suddenly, he pushed her down into the floor and started jackhammering her, and she cried out frantically, Jason hissed: “You like? You like it? You like?”

As he fucked her, Jason kept staring into Russell’s eyes growling:

“You like it, Lewis? How’s it feel, Russell Lewis? Take it, Russ! Take it, Russ. Take my cock! Take my fucking cock, Russ! Take it! Take…Oh, God! Jeeeesusss—” and then he shouted, gasped, and Russell saw Jason’s eyes widen, his face lose control.

Russell jumped at the touch of Gilead’s hand.

“What the fuck?” Gilead started, then after looking for a bit, shook his head and sia,d “Come one, Russell,” and pulled him away.

Russell was reeling. All he knew was Gilead’s voice asking if anyone had seen Bobby, describing him as best he could. Finally Gilead ended upstairs. Down the hall and into the bedroom that someone had directed him to. Gilead, too exasperated for respect, walked into the bedroom and Russell got one quick glimpse of Bobby Reyes’s round, yellow, shiny ass jouncing up and down and all around and all they heard were the delirious screams of some faceless girl under him.

“Well,” said Gilead, heading down the stairs with Russell in tow, both of them at a much slower pace, “I could certainly use a cigarette about now.”

Someone off in a corner was screaming his head off in the middle of a drug trip, and the air was white and pungent with marijuana and other things Russell could not name.

“I’ve got to get my head clear,” Russell said, his voice a half step off of desperate, and he marched ahead of Gilead to be outside on the little back porch that looked out onto a small yard. Gilead soon joined him, and they both sat on the porch, in the cool early March darkness, almost too blown away to even ask the question, “What’s next?”

“This,” Russell decided. “is beyond my depth.”

“You’re right about that.”

The boys nearly jumped out of their socks and turned around to see, in a short black dress, taking a drag that reddened her cigarette tip, one of the most beautiful girls either one of them had ever seen.  Her skin was pale in the night, but Gilead thought she was light skinned or Mexican. She regarded them with dark, hooded, but not unfriendly almond eyes. Her hair was about as black as her dress and down her back. This was none other than Bobby’s sister they now both realized, and because they’d seen her first as an enraged stranger, it was easier to separate her from their schoolmate who was pumping some girl upstairs.

What was her name? Anigel... Reyes sat herself down between the two of them. Damn, she was tall.

“Cigarette?” she offered. Gilead, despite what he’d said a few minutes ago, rejected it with a shake of the head and a thank you, but something in Russell, in the air, in this night, in the strangeness of this night, made him accept, and he let Anigel light his cigarette. He knew better than to suck on it. He let the smoke sit in his mouth that first time. It was actually a little thrilling to smoke. So this was the mystery his mother and father, Aunt Jackie, and half of his elders had been initiated into so long ago, this gentle intake, this rolling around of the smoke in one’s mouth. He watched the smoke tendril into the dark night from Anigel Reyes’s mouth and nose.

“So are you friends of my brother?” she asked.

“Sort of,” Gilead said. “I’ve known Bobby for about three years.”

“That’s funny,” Anigel mused, crushing out her cigarette. “The two of you don’t look like the kind of people Bobby’d hang around with. I mean, you look like the kind of people he should hang around but... It’s Strogue and all them he’s with all the time. You know?”

“Even Ralph Balusik?” Gilead said amazed.

“Ralph?” Anigel twisted her face and laughed. “He’s not that bad. He’s not good either. He’s not really Bobby’s friend. You might say he’s a relation.”

“Wha?” Russell was startled by this new piece of information.

“Our sister, Caroline,” Anigel explained. “She’s married to Ralph’s older brother.”

“The world gets smaller and smaller everyday,” Gilead commented.

“So you do know,” Anigel made a vague gesture with her cigarette at the noisy house behind them, “all of them?”

“We know D.L. more than anyone else,” said Russell. “Actually, Gilead knows all of them. I’ve been keeping a sort of low profile in the school—”

“Bullshit—” inserted Gilead.

“Yeah,” Anigel agreed, chuckling, “How can you keep a low profile looking like,” she lifted some of his vomit colored scarf, “this?”

“Well,” Russell amended. “I just don’t speak to other people.”

“So what happened—?”Anigel interrupted herself. “Wait a minute, guys. What are your names?”

“Gilead Story.”

“Russell Lewis.”

“Anigel Reyes,” Anigel Reyes offered her hand. “I’m pleased to meet you all. Now tell me, Russell, what happened.”

And when he told Anigel about our Lady of the Sacred Marlboro she couldn’t stop laughing.

“I mean,” he went on logically, “for the Mexicans there’s Our Lady of Guadalupe, for the Poles Our Lady of…. Well, a lot of shit. For Black people... I don’t really know what’s for Black people, but for the smokers—”

“Our Lady of the Sacred Marlboro?” Anigel guessed, slapping her knee.

Russell, rolling the smoke around in his mouth, exhaled and said, “You got it.”

“Well shit,” Anigel commented, “Maybe it’s time to go back to church.

“Smoking,” Anigel commented, lighting a new cigarette off the old stub, “is a nasty habit.”

She turned to Russell. “Want another?”

The boy looked at her, shrugged, held his hand out. Anigel laughed.

“So, Gilead Story,” said Anigel, “while Russell was hiding out, you were running around being popular?”

“Not exactly,” Gilead answered. “You see, for the bulk of my freshman year I wasn’t Black.”

“Wasn’t?” Anigel started, then understood and nodding, chuckling, ashing, she nodded and let him go on.

“If you speak proper English and act like you have average intelligence, then for some reason you’re not quite ethnic enough. Forget it if they see you reading a book. And Catholic too! It was a while before people came around to accepting me as a Negro.”

“How courteous of them,” Anigel answered, remembering similar days. “For me it was the whole being mixed with half of America—part this, part that. Bobby never got the flack though. I hope when you started school Bobby wasn’t one of the assholes.”

“Bobby was always decent,” said Gilead. “But he fit right in whereas I... well, I never fit in anywhere exactly, let alone in our little ghetto.”

“Was that hard?” Russell asked.

“I don’t know, you tell me?” Gilead said, not unharshly. “You don’t fit in any better than me. It wasn’t that I was strange for a Black person, well it was. But it was also that. I was just strange.”

“My friends,” Anigel said, lighting yet another cigarette, “when I started at Rosary, no one could tell is I was Black or Mexican or mixed or what, and half the girls said I was a lesbian, and by the time I’d left I was dating white boys, and I’d told the principal I was an atheist. I felt like people talked shit about me every day, and then you know what it all got me?”

“Grief?” Gilead guessed.

“Well, yes,” Anigel allowed, “but also—Prom Queen.”

“People are fucked,” Gilead decided.

“I really thought everyone respected you,” Russell shook his head at Gilead.

“They do now. But it was rough. Once. That’s why I say pople are fucked. Now I have respect, and Anigel got to be queen of the prom.”

“I still got the tiara too.”

“I would love to see it—” Gilead started when they heard someone shout from inside the house:

“Shit man! POLICE!”

They heard a roar, then a dull but increasing scream.

“Shit!” Anigel swore, spitting her cigarette out and grabbing the boys’ hands. “We gotta hustle.”

They skittered across the yard. Halfway across, the barefoot Anigel said, “Get my shoes. They’re on the porch.”

Then, as Russell turned back and a scream came from the house, she said, “Fuck it. Come on.”

Anigel ran to the gate, opened it and pushed the boys out into the alley, her hand fumbling to close the gate behind them as the bungalow went into a general uproar.

“Let’s move!” Anigel commanded, tiptoeing on the gravel before the boys, as she cried, “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” in rhythm to the pain the gravel dealt her feet before Russell and Gilead hoisted Bobby’s sister up and carried her down the alley, three houses to the corner of Hurst Street.