Works and Days

The Gift of True Light

Conclusion

They’d learned all about Barrelon by midnight. Now and again Russell or Gilead would slip out of their shoes to let Anigel wear them. It was mostly a quiet town of hills and houses, bungalows. Anigel showed them dormitories, showed them Harshman Hall where the English department was.

“It looks more like a hospital,” Russell commented.

“Doesn’t it though?” Anigel agreed.

A lone car passed down the hill they were walking up, Rafferty Street. Here was the curio store Anigel worked in. There was an area of the college town that reminded Russell of Soho, or what he thought Soho should look like, filled with little shops and lofts and restaurants with miniature courtyards that were closed up and dyed blue white by the moon at this time of night.

“We should probably bail out Bobby,” said Gilead.

“With what?” Anigel demanded. “My toenail? I don’t have a thing to bail my baby brother outta jail. He better call Mama. Right now what we’ve got to do is figure out how to get you back home.”

“Good point,” Gilead agreed.

“Now,” said Anigel, “just how do we go about doing that? If I had wheels, then it wouldn’t be an issue.”

“What about Eric and Jenean?” Russell suggested.

“Eric and Je—oh! How do you know them?” Anigel started, then, “Oh, yeah, they were at the party. I don’t know if they could help, but they’re the only people I know, really. Did they leave the party before the arrest?”

‘Yeah,” said Gilead. “Quite a while before.”

 

They had to retrace their way down Rafferty to Cash Hall, which was in a little valley at the base of several of the city hills. It was actually three large stone buildings that made a courtyard, facing the corner of Rafferty and Bywight, a coed dorm where both Eric and Jenean lived.

“I knew the police would come,” Jenean murmured, shaking her head and lighting a cigarette. “It’s a good thing you guys were in the back when you were.”

“But speaking of back,” Jenean had tapped on Eric’s door as soon as Anigel and the boys had come up to her second floor room. Neither one of them had ever gone to bed. Eric was speaking now, “how are they gon get back? Wait a minute, what about Jeff?”

“Jeff who?” Anigel started.

“Her man,” Eric replied before Jenean could say anything.

“He said he’d come through at about two in the morning.”

“He’s going to Geschichte Falls?” Gilead was incredulous.

“He’s going through Geschichte Falls,” said Jenean.

Russell and Gilead had both thought they would call Chayne as soon as they were able. He wasn’t much of a driver, but he could find someone and get to them. This plan, however, seemed better.

“It’s little coincidences like these that are gonna stop Anigel from being an atheist,” Jenean said.

Anigel crossed one leg over the other and admitted, “It becomes a harder and harder faith to maintain.”

They sat around playing cards. They were waiting for someone, and that entailed staying in one place. So they went from Rummy to Spades to modified Tonk, modified Anigel said, because everyone would have to be Black and there’d have to be liquor for an all out Tonk party.

Jeff arrived at about three a.m. while Russell was yawning his head off. His visit was short, as it had to be, and he was more than willing to take Russell and Gilead back home.

“To stay on schedule, I can pass through town, I mean, do you know Salem Street, where the bus station is?”

“Yeah,” both Gilead and Russell answered.

Gilead said, “That’s more than good enough.”

It was Gilead who was first to shake everyone’s hands.

“It’s been good getting to know all of you.”

“Don’t yawl be strangers,” Eric commanded.

“If I don’t see you again...” Russell started to say to Anigel, but she shushed him.

“Russell Lewis,” she said, “one thing I’ve learned is that it’s just not that easy to never see people again. The world isn’t that big, let alone the state.”

 

Jeff Mc.Guire was twenty-three, tall and lanky, with faded blue jeans and a receding hairline.

“If you—ever plan to motor west—travel my way—take the highway that’s the best. Get your kicks—on route—six-six!” he sang.

“I love jazz, and blues too. Well, I like the blues alright, but I really do love jazz, especially that old stuff. Well it winds—” he turned it up, “from Chicago to L.A.—more than two—thousand miles—all the way—get your kicks—on route—six-six!”

Like Anigel, he had decided college was not for him, at least not right now. Jeff told them how he’d grown up in Saint Gregory, the town on the northeast border of Geschichte Falls, and done “all sorts of crazy shit”. He was never able to get along with his father. Then something has possessed him to join the National Guard.

“They beat all the bullshit out of you,” Jeff said. “Every two weeks I still go up to Kalamazoo to do my national duty. Right now I’m going up to Grand Rapids.”

“How did you meet Jenean?” Gilead asked.

 Russell was all for letting Gilead do the talking, as he rolled over in the cab and closed his eyes.

“She used to work at the Kroger in town, and I’d always come over and see her. She was the only cashier I’d have. Kind of romantic in a retail sort of way.”

Gilead laughed. Russell chuckled sleepily. Suddenly he realized that it was somewhere past four in the morning, and he’d never called his parents. The worry shook him awake for a few minutes, then, because his body knew as well as the rest of him that worrying could not make it possible for him them now, he fell asleep, vowing to come up with a highly edited version of this night by the time he got back to Breckinridge.

 

Gilead was shaking him awake, then they were piling out of Jeff’s truck on Salem Street before the bus station.

“Thanks, Jeff, we’ll take it from here,” Gilead was saying, and Russell thanked Jeff too. The truck roared a whistle at them, and then roared down Salem. After that, Salem was basically quiet, for it couldn’t have been anymore than six a.m. on a Saturday morning in Geschichte Falls, Michigan. The sky was white with dawn, and the street was bleak, waiting for the gift of true light. The first of the morning buses was roaring into town, and Russell asked Gilead if he had change.

“Change for the both of us,” Gilead handed Russell three quarters. “Never leave home without it. I take the Number Seven and you take the...?”

“Fifteen goes through—well, by—Breckinridge.”

“Alright then oh, there’s the Number Seven now!” and Gilead set off across the lot to where the Seven was pulling up.

“I’ll catch you on Monday. I’ll be asleep all day today!” Gilead cried, then, as the bus doors opened for him, Gilead Story hopped on the Number Seven and it swallowed him as it tilted and rumbled east, in the opposite direction of Jeff’s truck.

Alone, and freshly awake, Russell rewrapped his scarf about his neck and strode toward the Number Fifteen. He walked on, put his seventy-five cents into the meter and nodded good morning to the driver. He scooted into the first horizontal seat of the empty Kirkland Outbound, pulling his knees to his chest. As the bus rumbled on out of the lot, and turned west down Salem, the marvel of these last twenty-four hours, of the strange changes that had occurred in his world in the last week, struck him, and as the bus turned from Salem, to Overton to Monroe, to rumble down Royal Street, past the dark glassy eyes of Aunt Jackie’s apartment building, the newly rising sun reflected yellow and red on all its windows and danced in golden ribbons before Russell’s eyes. The sun warmed his face. He closed his eyes and he could see what he had dreamed of, what had not left his eyes, Jason, in the dark, fucking that girl, Jason’s grey green eyes burning him, Jason, who hated him, nearly naked, the body Russell hated to be beautiful, flexing and unflexing in the dark, pumping up and down, groaning, “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!...”

It made him hot. The light through the trees danced over his face. He was stiff with thinking of someone who had only felt contempt for him. He was… confused. More confused than he had been in a long time because the boy he had hoped would be his friend, who had shown only contempt for him had called out his name while fucking someone. Russell was so ashamed and so confused, and thinking of Jason, left in that closet, having sex in front of him, calling a girl by his name, he wondered if maybe Jason Lorry was ashamed and confused too.

Monday morning, Russell was closing up his locker and slinging his bag over his shoulder before inserting himself in the stream of adolescent lunchtime traffic, when he and Gilead bumped into Jason Lorry and Ralph Balusik.

“There you guys are!” Ralph said.

“Huh?” Russell began.

Ralph looked… unsure? And then he leaned in and whispered,  “How’d you guys get away from the party?”

There was only one party. It had been whispered about through the school because three of the most popular students from the sophomore class had been arrested and expelled for being there.

“Grace,” Gilead said. “We heard that the parties in that house always got busted.”

Russell added, “That’s what we were coming to tell you all. When we found you.”

He looked to Jason.

Jason went red, and turned away.

“Found us?” Ralph began. Then his eyes widened, and he went red.

“Oh, yeah.”

Then Ralph said, “You were coming to get us?”

“Why would we want you to get arrested?” was all Gilead said.

“Right,” Ralph said, his brow furrowed, a small frown on his face.

Jason was still looking at the ground, fiddling with the straps of his book bag and Russell, more uncomfortable with silence, jumped in with:

 “Me and Gilead were sitting on the back porch with Bobby’s sister—”

“Anigel?” Ralph said.

“Yeah,” Russell said. “She heard the cops and had us run. She even gave us—gave me—cigarettes.”

“You smoke?” Ralph looked at his classmate with a combination of surprise and respect, and now Jason looked up as well.

Russell shrugged, trying to look nonchalant and said, “Sometimes. When I feel like it.”

“Yeah,” said Ralph. “Well... it’s a good thing you and Gilead got away. Did Anigel take you home?”

“No,” Gilead said.

“We hitchhiked,” Russell elaborated. “We took a semi home.”

“What?” Jason started, his green eyes lighting up.

Ralph said, “You’re shitting me!”

“No.”

“You are!”

The traffic in the halls had died down. Russell smiled widely, coolly and murmured, “Naw, man. We’re not.”

“Well. Well, shit,” Ralph decided. “Well, it’s good you all got away. Right, Jay?”

“Yeah,” Jason said, his voice soft, though he was still looking more to the floor than to Gilead or Russell.

“Say,” Gilead began, “What about you all? How did you get away?”

Jason laughed, and it was almost as if he had been dying for someone to ask.

“We locked ourselves in the pantry and hid under coats until everything was over. I was so scared!” his eyes were wide.

“I was too,” Ralph volunteered.

Russell wondered what had happened to the girl. Was she with them in the pantry, or had they gotten rid of her, or had she gotten rid of them and gone on about her college business? What had passed between Ralph and Jason, hiding away in a closet where only a few minutes ago he had been having proxy sex with Russell? Russell knew to ask that would shatter whatever peace the four of them were having.

“DL and all them… they got hauled away. Bobby too,” Ralph continued. “We had to wait all night till Ani got back. Then she called my brother and he came back and got us.”

“I felt like such a punk,” Jason said, “riding in the backseat of his car back home.”

Suddenly Jason’s eyes went dark. His voice was soft as it had been when Russell first met him.

“I feel like a punk most of the time, though, so…” he shrugged.

“We all do, you know,” Gilead said.

“Huh?” Jason said.

“Feel like punks.”

“I’m not really a punk, Russ,” Ralph said suddenly.

Now it was Russell who said, “Huh?”

“All that shit I said?” Ralph said quickly, “All the stuff I say? I’m... I’m not a punk. I’m not really a creep.”

All four of them stood face to face saying nothing, and then it was Gilead who said, “We could really be less shitty to each other. You know?”

Jason Lorry jammed his hands in his pockets, still looking at his shoes as he kicked invisible dirt. He was nodding his head seriously and looking a little sad.

“Yeah,” he said, “we could.”