Night Kites Read online

  “‘I and my Annabel Lee,’” I finished it for her. “I remember that from English too.”

  “What would you do without English?” she said.

  We were smiling at each other that same way again.

  Smiling … but I was thinking what the hell am I even doing here?

  If that question was on her mind, she never asked it.

  Tacky, shabby, shitty, going to rack and ruin—those were the only words to describe Kingdom By The Sea, yet I could imagine that once it had been a crazy, fantastic place: mysterious and silly and rare. All the suites, like hers and Bells, Bells, Bells; The Raven; Helen; and The Black Cat, faced the ocean, while ordinary rooms with baths faced the Montauk Highway, with a courtyard separating them. In the center of the courtyard there was an old fountain Nicki said hadn’t worked in years, “But when it did, it was lucky, and people tossed pennies into it and made wishes. I loved that thing! I threw my whole allowance into it! When Daddy cleaned it out, I never took my pennies back because I thought my wishes wouldn’t come true if I did.” We were looking down on the fountain from a window in the hall on the third floor.

  “What were your wishes?” I asked her.

  “Oh, you know how kids are, what kids wish for.”

  “I don’t know what kids like you wished for.”

  “Kids like me? I wasn’t any different then.”

  “So what’d you wish for?”

  “Things. A doll. A bicycle. What I wished for and never got was a white horse. I got that from ‘Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross, To see a fine lady upon a white horse.’ See, I was her. Rings on her fingers, bells on her toes, et cetera.”

  “‘She shall have music wherever she goes.’”

  “English again?” She laughed.

  Then she said, “If it wasn’t pouring out, I’d take you down there so we could read the inscription on the fountain. My mother was into inscriptions, among other flawed things. The inscription reads Thou wast that all to me, love, For which my soul did pine—A green isle in the sea, love, A fountain and a shrine.… My mother and Daddy had this thing between them where the earth moves? She was a lot younger than he was, a good fifteen years younger…. Want to go swimming?”

  “Swimming?”

  “Inside,” she said. “We’ve got a heated saltwater pool down the hall.”

  It was called City By The Sea. There was a mural of New York’s skyline going all the way around the room, with this huge pear-shaped pool in the center. There were a lot of white wooden chairs with the paint peeling, minus their cushions, set around the pool, on a tile floor. Nicki went into the control room to get the filter and heat going, and I wondered if they’d added any chlorine to it lately; it looked a little too green.

  “Is it going?” she shouted out to me. “I don’t want to turn it up too high, because it makes the TV in the bar jump when the power’s up.”

  “It’s going!”

  She came out and said, “See, they’re all watching the Colts in the bar.”

  “I don’t follow football. Just local football.” I thought of Jack. I thought, Jesus, what the shit am I doing here with Jack’s girl?

  “Daddy doesn’t have any bonds to cash in even if I did want to go to college, which I don’t. I just made that up. We’re practically bankrupt here.”

  “A lot of people don’t go to college.”

  “I made all that up about Daddy wanting to meet all of you before we all went into New York City, too.”

  “Okay.”

  We were both standing there staring down at the pool. The water was beginning to move.

  “I knew that was what you all expected, that Daddy’d want to look you over.”

  “Well, we’re not put into this world to live up to other people’s expectations,” I said. I’d seen that on some poster somewhere.

  She put out the cigarette she was smoking in another seashell. “College would be more of the same. More pom-pom girls, more dumb crowds going everywhere together. Why does everyone travel around in packs?”

  I was thinking, What the hell am I going to wear if we go swimming? I had jockeys on, and I knew what jockeys would look like wet.

  “I don’t know why everyone travels around in packs,” I said.

  “Like animals or something,” she said.

  “Like packs of dogs. Dog packs.” I could just jump in in my pants.

  “Like herds. Sheep.”

  “Its security or something,” I said.

  “Security. Is that what it is?” She reached down and pulled her sweater over her head.

  I just stood there.

  She didn’t have a bra on.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’m not doing a striptease for your benefit. We’re going swimming, aren’t we?”

  So we went swimming, naked, and after we swam around for a while, staying as far away from each other as possible, she swam underwater surfacing a heart-beat away from me, then putting her arms up around my neck, and I could feel her breasts against my chest.

  “You’re going to drown me,” I said.

  “Am I ever going to drown you!” she said. “Don’t you want me to?”

  Somehow we got down to the shallow end, where we could touch, and that was what we did. We touched.

  I could feel the softness of her lips and her body, and hear the sound of the rain on the sunroof over us.

  “I forgot to turn on the music,” she said at one point. “I can flood this place with music.”

  “Well, I’m hearing something that sounds like music,” I said.

  “I’ll put the real music on later,” she said. “Much later … after I’m tired of you.”

  I don’t remember it getting dark. It was just dark finally.

  We sneaked through the halls carrying our clothes, shivering, running for her bed when we got down to her room, jumping under the covers wet, giggling, talking very softly to each other, though there was no reason to, almost whispering: It’s so late, it’s gotten so dark, nothing sentences said almost solemnly in low, gentle voices.

  “What about your dad?” I said finally. I was thinking about my own, about Mom, too.

  “Let me put a light on,” she said. “Let me buzz down and tell him I’ll be down soon.”

  “What if he finds me here?”

  “He won’t come up. He’s on the bar.” She snapped on a lamp. Scatter was sitting on the bureau, watching us with light-blue crossed eyes.

  “Have you got a phone I can use?”

  She pointed to it on the table beside the bed. “Come here first.”

  Then she said, “I’m going to have to change those wet sheets. Oh, don’t go away, Erick. Not yet … not yet.”

  I finally said I’d better make a phone call. Yes, she said.

  I knew Mom would be worried.

  Nicki got up and threw on a robe, and shouted something through a speaker on the wall about being hungry enough to eat a horse. “Oh, that’s what’s on the menu tonight? Horsemeat? Well, good!” She laughed…. She said, “Who’s been calling? Who?” and laughed again. Jack, I thought.

  She said, “Make your call. Then I’ll walk you down.”

  I pulled on my jockeys and my pants, and got into my shirt.

  She brought my shoes and socks over to me, leaned down, and kissed me on the mouth.

  I was trembling as I dialed.

  Dad answered the phone.

  “Erick? I’m sorry about my behavior.” I was light years away from his behavior. “There’s no excuse for it,” he said. Then he came up with one. “This whole business is more upsetting to me than I care to admit to myself…. The Neanderthal Man called several times.” He tried laughing it off.

  “He probably just misses me,” I said. “You know how it is, Dad.”

  “All right. I deserve that.”

  “Tell Mom I’ll be there shortly.”

  Nicki put my tie around my neck, slapped my hands away from it, and said, “Let me tie it.”

  After she ha
d it tied, she said, “Do you have to go?

  “I have to go.”

  We walked out into the hall and down the spiral staircase about as slowly as two people could walk. She asked me how I’d get home and I said I’d get home, not to worry.

  In front of the door, I turned around and faced her. She had slippers on and the white robe, and I reached inside the robe and touched her.

  “You want to get home, don’t you? You won’t get home that way.”

  I started to say something about Jack, something about how I didn’t know how I could have let myself do what I did to Jack, but she shook her head no and put one finger to my lips, to hush me.

  I caught her hand and then I let it go.

  I turned back around and opened the door. I heard her say the rain had stopped, good, I wouldn’t get wet. She snapped on floodlights.

  When I was halfway down the walk, she came running toward me from behind, and I stopped when she called, “Erick? Wait!”

  “What?”

  I turned around and she caught hold of me, and we sort of spun around and around, hanging on to each other, laughing, then not laughing. “I hate for you to go!” she said. We stood there in the bright lights like people onstage in a play.

  “I’ll be back,” I said.

  I closed my eyes, holding her as hard as I could, and when I opened them, I saw the Mustang, stopped just at the drawbridge. He must have been on his way up the road when he spotted us.

  “Jack,” I said. “It’s Jack,” and I watched him back up, then turn around and take off.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE SCHOOL WEEK BEGAN with a letter from Dill, taped to my locker.

  Dear Erick,

  Jack came by last night, and I guess I don’t have to tell you what we talked about. Since you didn’t even call to see if I was back from Massachusetts, I guess what Jack saw at Kingdom By The Sea says it all. I’ve known since we came back from New York that something was wrong that something happened there to change you. I guess it’s boring to be stuck with someone who doesn’t put out, right? Well, you knew what to do about that, didn’t you? The thing I can’t get over isn’t even what you did to us by running off to her, it’s what you did to Jack! I might have forgiven you for going behind my back to make out with someone like her, if that’s what you did, but I could never, ever forgive you for going behind Jack’s back, going after the only girl he ever cared anything about. If that’s the kind of friend you are, then how could anyone trust you?

  I don’t want anything more to do with you. In a way I’m glad this happened senior year, since I can now go on to Wheaton (if I get in, and it looks good!) and not have anyone from the past to keep me from enjoying the future. I hope you enjoy yours, Rudd, but if I were you I wouldn’t sleep well nights … but maybe sex with The Slut will help you sleep.

  Dill

  That was the strangest week I ever spent at Seaville High.

  Overnight, Nicki and I became an instant couple, but we were like the two new kids in some school where we didn’t even know anyone’s name, left to ourselves as word spread like a fire through dry grass that I’d taken Jack’s girl away from him.

  On the one hand, I’d see Dill pass me in the halls as though I wasn’t there, and Jack looking everywhere but at me, and I’d feel this incredible loneliness, like I was the invisible man.

  On the other hand, I’d see Nicki coming toward me, wearing one of her goofy, great, beautiful outfits, a yellow lace dress, say, with that nutty black-leather-fringe jacket, the traffic accident on its back, and she’d be smiling at me, and she was mine, so none of the rest of it mattered. But it was definitely a high/low game, and I tried to think of it as a game, though it was so intense sometimes I’d catch my breath, and long for the old familiar routines of senior year, being tight with one girl and one crowd, and having a long history with both, instead of all of it being new.

  And always, there was Pete on my mind. Always the thought that if I ever needed Dill and Jack, the main ones in my life who knew what Pete was to me, it was then.

  So it was back and forth, and I was down so low sometimes I felt like a complete stranger to myself, then up, soaring, lost somewhere with her, too high to care about the rest of it.

  Nights when I wasn’t working, I was out at Kingdom By The Sea, for as long as I could stay, in Dream Within A Dream, or swimming down in City By The Sea—a wave to Cap Marr, a word or two exchanged between us … and I remembered the first time she’d introduced me to him, he’d grinned and said, “A new one, Fickle Pickle? Well, what’s your name? … Rudd? Don’t let her make your name Mud, Rudd,” laughing.

  “This is different, Daddy!” Nicki told him. “So don’t scare him off, hmmm? I’m not a fickle pickle anymore.”

  If anyone wasn’t going to scare me off, it was her father. He was like this large, overgrown kid, cuddling the Siamese cats in his arms, giving them the run of the bar, strolling around in his Help Feed The People T-shirt, with the visor cap tipped forward hiding his eyes. There were always girls years younger than he was nursing tequila sunrises on tall stools, while he watched sports on the TV up on the shelf over the bar, or talked with Toledo, who’d scare anyone off, he was so bad-tempered and big.

  If a kid could dream up the perfect father for the girl he was dating, Cap would win hands down. He was mellowed out like someone with a horrendous pot habit; nothing seemed to ruffle his feathers, not our skinny-dipping in the pool, not my presence in her bedroom.

  “He’s in the midst of a major nervous breakdown because we’re losing so much business?” Nicki said. “See, major disappointments make him real sweet.”

  “Maybe you’d have more business if you got rid of Toledo.”

  “Toledo looks worse than he is. It’s just that fags get to him. He said seeing a fag walk in the bar was like seeing the first maggot crawl onto a dead body, like it was the end here. Toledo’s been with this place since we started, so it’s like his place, too. We’ve always had motorcycle guys, like Ski, or fishermen. It’s always been a macho bar.”

  “Do fags bother you?” I asked her.

  “Me? I’d love to make love to one. Change him? I bet I could!”

  “What if he didn’t want to change?”

  Nicki laughed. “I’d let him dress up in my clothes. I’d help him be a real queen like Boy George. I’d play him The Age of Consent.”

  “I don’t know The Age of Consent.”

  “It’s Bronski Beats album. They’re this Scottish trio who’re gay. They all wear pink triangles like the ones homosexuals were forced to wear by the Nazis. They have this song ‘Smalltown Boy,’ about a gay kid who has to get away from his family and his town.”

  “But what if a fag isn’t swishy; what if he looks like any other guy?”

  “Then that’s such a waste,” Nicki said. “That’s just a waste of manpower, isn’t it?”

  I let the subject drop there.

  That Friday afternoon when I got home from school, there was a SAAB 900 Turbo in the driveway, with JJSCIFI on the license plate.

  Mom met me at the door to tell me Jim Stanley and Pete were in the living room having coffee. She said Oscar’d been put to sleep.

  I ducked into the kitchen to get control of myself. I blew my nose and got a Coke from the refrigerator. I was standing at the sink, trying to keep back the tears, when Pete came in.

  “Why didn’t you at least let me say good-bye to him?” I said.

  “We got here at two,” Pete said. “The vet closes at four…. You knew I was going to do it this week.”

  “I didn’t know when. I guess I’m not grown-up enough to be told that, either.”

  Pete ignored that. He said, “I thought it was my responsibility, Ricky.”

  “Yours and Jim’s?”

  “Ricky, Jim was just kind enough to drive me out.”

  “God, Pete, he was my dog, too!”

  Pete looked thinner every time I saw him. I felt rotten for shouting at him.
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  He put his arm around my shoulder. “I held Oscar while he got the shot. He went very peacefully.”

  “Poor Oscar Wilde.” I smiled up at Pete. “I’m sorry I blew up at you.”

  “Forget it. Come on in and see Jim. We can’t stay for dinner.”

  Pete had on a herringbone tweed jacket, gray flannels, a white shirt, and a striped tie.

  “Why are you so dressed up?”

  “I stopped in to see Reverend Shorr. Mom’s going to need some support, eventually.”

  “You told him?”

  “That’s why I went to see him.”

  “Does Dad know you told him?”

  “Just you and Jim know. Mom doesn’t even know. I want somebody outside of family to be ready to help Mom.”

  “What did old Snore say?”

  “He said how fond he was of Mom. Then he started talking about the way homosexuality was treated in the Bible. He said something about anyone who reaches back four thousand years and pulls forward a law code written for nomads in the desert, and claims it applies here and now, isn’t being honest with the scriptures.”

  “Then he’s not against it?”

  “He’s certainly not for it,” Pete said. “He was treating the subject intellectually. You know Snore. He was quoting Leviticus and what Paul said in Romans, questioning the interpretation.” Pete sank his hands into his trousers and said, “Ricky? Mom always acts like she’s solid as a rock, like nothing surprises her, but there’s a lot of stuff coming down she doesn’t even imagine.”

  “Like what, Pete?”

  “Okay. I had to make a deal with Southworth. Legally, they can’t fire me because I have AIDS. But I knew they wouldn’t want me around. I need my medical benefits, and I’ve earned them. So I offered to take a leave of absence with a month’s notice. They accepted the offer, providing that I left that day.”

  I started to say something, but Pete held up his hand. “Wait, there’s more…. I told a friend of mine in the apartment building. At least I thought she was my friend. I’m going to lose the sublet. She’s circulating a petition to get me out. It’s not my apartment, so I can’t fight it…. I’m a little like a leper, pal. I’m a lot like one.”