Calluses Pt. 09: Gone

Thunder roared, shaking the windows of the trailer. The storm was hungry, pelting the roof with talons and fangs. I felt along the ruffled blankets beside me, searching, until a great flash of lightning lit up the bedroom for a cold, fleeting moment...just long enough to tell me I was alone.

I wasn't really alone, though. I could hear it, out there in the rain...shuffling through the mud like a wounded bear, staggered and heavy...dragging its claws across the cheap siding of the trailer as it sniffed the drowning air, searching. The blue-red flicker of its eyes appeared in the window above my head, flooding the room with their pulse, now dancing across the fetal mound of my body under the blankets, hidden and trembling...

I knew it saw me anyway, of course. I knew it hated me for what I'd done to it, and it was going to punish me now. Even as the glass shattered, and the storm rushed in, I found I could not move...

A muffled crunch of plastic and metal yanked me back up into consciousness.

I was still in Russell's bed, still alone, but sunlight and chirping birds and a looming, poisonous hangover told me it was morning.

I was too exhausted and crusty to open my eyes all the way. I was hollow and aching down to the lining of my guts, the marrow of my bones, like I hadn't even slept at all. The blankets were everything I wasn't, soft and warm and perfect around my curled body, and they smelled like him. It was a good smell, different yet familiar...safe. I didn't want to leave their musty womb just yet, no...I only wanted to sink back down into the abyss behind my eyelids, where I hoped the dream was gone for now...

A second crunch pierced the walls of the trailer, followed closely by third, fourth, more - louder and meaner and louder again, over and over and over...

I pried my eyes open, blinking until they were wet enough to use. Russell Barrett's bedroom was a different world in the light of day, messy and lived-in with stains on the walls, swirls of dust drifting in golden sunlight above my head...

I sat up with a jolt, searching myself, still foggy and irrational from the dream I was pretending to forget, expecting to find myself naked underneath the blankets, blindly sure that my boxers and shirt had been stripped off while I slept...why else would he have drugged me with that Xanex...but the shirt and boxers he'd given me the night before where still on me, wrinkled and damp with drying sweat, and I wasn't naked at all...

This was worse, though, because I was wearing his clothes. Not mine. My memory of the night before hadn't fully congealed; I remembered taking his clothes from his hands, but I couldn't remember if he'd ever actually said I could wear them, which opened up a deep black pit of dread in my stomach, because I didn't want him to punish me...

But of course Russell hadn't stripped my clothes off while I slept. Of course I wasn't going to be punished for wearing them. This was a trailer somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina...not the cold, shadowy house down in the dilapidated bowels of Georgia...and Russell was not the Chief.

I buried my face in the pillow. The bed smelled like Russell, different and the same, safe...but I was too awake to let that put me to sleep again. Russell had told me something...heavy. Something bad. I wanted to ignore it, run away from it...but instead I was drowning in it, anxiety creeping in like quicksand, sinking into the mattress as my thoughts spiraled into -

Another smashing blow erupted from somewhere outside.

I pushed the blankets off and dragged my body out of bed, chasing the distraction while the spiral was broken. I found my boots and jeans in a tidy pile at the foot of the bed, wallet and phone still safe in their pockets. I pulled them on as I wobbled down the narrow hall into the empty living room. I parted the blinds at the picture window, squinting painfully through the heady, glaring migraine and the raw daylight.

My old sedan was still parked on the packed-dirt driveway out front, right next to Russell's shiny black truck, and his figure stood tall in the grassy field beyond. His back was to me, hunched low over the ground. He raised a wicked-looking blunt instrument above his head, and smashed it down - destroying something. I knew what it was, too.

Another crunch - the biggest one yet - and the Chief's laptop finally shattered against the ground between his feet, now scattered across the grass like a wave of glittering shrapnel.

I almost didn't leave the trailer. I was finally remembering just how badly I'd fucked up with him, this older, angrier man who regularly mingled with hardened killers. I didn't actually know him at all, and I definitely didn't know what he was truly capable of...how stupid was it to come here alone, and give myself over to this stranger? How stupid was it to all but...rape him, last night? He could clearly kick my ass two or three times over, and I definitely deserved it. I wouldn't even try to stop him, should he decide he needed to do that...but what if he didn't stop there? What if he decided to really get even...or worse, that nobody could ever know? Now that the laptop was gone, I was the only loose end left, besides himself...

I shivered. There was something even worse than any of that, and it was also the most likely thing to happen by far; if I went out there to greet him, he would tell me to leave. No more, no less. I understood, of course, even if the thought ripped me up inside for some stupid, useless reason...

Man up, goddamn it.

He didn't flinch when the screen door swung shut behind me with a bang, nor did he acknowledge my footsteps as I approached. He was a barefoot statue under the towering branches of the oak tree, but I kept my eye on him anyway. He wore a tight gray t-shirt and loose, clingy pajama bottoms that hung low on his hips...low enough to tell me he hadn't bothered putting on boxers underneath. Fresh, spreading sweat stains darkened the fabric under each bulging arm, the patch between his shoulder blades...the small of his back...

I bit my cheek, hard enough to taste copper.

Focus.

A heavy steel wrench hung low in his right hand. It was dangerous, real, and I didn't know what else he planned on doing with it. I just knew it was massive, a tool for taming fiery steel engines...and he knew how to swing it hard enough to crush a human skull...same as he'd just done to the Chief's laptop. It wasn't recognizable of course, reduced to a useless pile of ruined circuitry and black plastic shards all over the ground, but I knew what it was. The disfigured yellow smiley-face sticker gazed up at me with its one remaining eye, half-shredded and curled into itself against a piece of dark metal, somehow smug even now.

"Mornin," Russell mumbled, once I was standing beside him. He stared down at the remains of the laptop, as if he didn't remember how it had gotten there.

I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything. The grassy meadow beyond the giant oak sparkled with morning dew, dense enough to feel on my skin. The ground rose steadily as it reached the treeline, the forest...and then it was the face of a lush, green mountainside, sunrise creeping over its sheer edges. We watched the dawn swell into true morning, the sky a shade brighter with each heavy blink...until it was blue and cloudless, blooming, drowning us in gold.

I rubbed the last bits of gunk from my eyes, finally awake. "Morning," I managed to say.

I glanced at Russell. He was still gazing off at the sunny mountainside, still caught in a dreamy trance. His messy red hair seemed a touch less vibrant in this harsh light, flecked here and there with silky gray strands. The pale skin of his face seemed to droop from the handsome symmetry of his skull, the scruff on his throat more ragged than virile...but his eyes were worse than any of it. They were distant, sinking into their sockets above twin beds of sagging purple flesh, as if his very thoughts were aging him. He seemed spent, worn out...old.

He blinked slowly, took a deep breath, and let the steel wrench swing lazily against his knee. "Had a dream last night," he said, as if I'd asked. "Dreamed you were gone when I woke up. Just up and left. Wasn't pretty like this, though...more stormy, like..." He took a deep breath, leveled himself out. "I thought I might've dreamed the whole thing up. You showin up, everything after...like you were a ghost, or something. But you were still here when I woke up, real as anything...and then I guess I remembered this damn thing was here too, and I didn't want the filthy goddamn thing in my house for one more second."

"I don't blame you."

He drove his heel into the smiley-face, grinding it down into the soil. "I thought about just sellin it...or maybe even sending some of those videos to the press down there, like you were gonna do. Show that whole damn town what he really was..." He scattered the rest with a mean kick, lost in the grass. "This made a lot more sense, though...once I realized I was doin it, anyway. And this is just the start. There's a lot of shit just like it that I need to get out of my house...my life..."

"Did you want me to go?" I asked, hearing only what I was afraid he'd say.

"Go...?" He was clearing up now, glancing over at me. "Nah, man. I mean...that's not what I'm sayin. I mean, not right now. I just..."

He took a deep breath, leveled himself out...but I knew he was relieved, because he didn't have to be the one to say it. "I'm sorry, Mike. You don't gotta go right this second or anything - but I don't think it'd be a great idea for you to sleep here again."

"I don't blame you," I said again, robotic.

He sighed, somehow more tired than I was. "I mean, I'll get some food in you, get you cleaned up and all, but...I just think it'd be better for both of us, at least for now. We're still too close to it, you know? To what happened. We still have to figure ourselves out, and I don't want either of us to get..." He swallowed. "I don't want us to slip into old habits, bad habits, when we should be learning how to pick up new ones. That make sense to you?"

"Yeah..." My face was getting hot, tightening up at the edges. It bit my cheek hard, just enough to keep the wetness out of my eyes.

"Good. That's good," he said, pulling into himself...and the spell of the morning was broken. "Are you gonna be okay?" he asked, forcing it out of his mouth. "About...you know. What I told you last night, about the Chief, before we went to..." He grimaced and swallowed hard, Adam's apple gliding along his throat...choosing his words carefully. "Before you passed out."

I wanted to cry again, wanted to bury us both in an avalanche of rage, and grief, and feeling, desperate to make any sense of it...but I kept my spine straight, pretending to pull away as well, because that was all he wanted us to do. I owed him that much, at least.

"Don't worry about it, man. I'll be fine."

"Damn straight, buddy. Damn straight." He was still side-eyeing me. "You know...you gotta have somebody better than me to talk to about this shit. Somebody totally fuckin removed from it, you know? It's just...too messy, otherwise. For both of us. Last night should tell you that much, and it's just..." His fingers dug into his thighs, making circles. "It's way too much, way too fast. You know? And it's not headed anywhere good...that's all." He ran a hand through his red hair, looking almost as miserable as I was. "You understand why things gotta be this way, don't you?"

I just nodded my head. "Can I ask you something, though? Before..."

"Of course you can," he said, even if it was a bit slow.

"When did you start to feel normal again?"

He was silent for a time, a long, lingering quiet...

"You don't," was his answer.

I looked over at him, barely believing his own words, and knowing they weren't enough. Still, he gave it a shot. "No such thing as 'normal.' We weren't normal before we met him...we were just different people, that's all. Now we've just gotta figure out how to be...somebody else. You know...who we are now."

He winced and looked away, shuffling his feet in the grass. "I know that sounds like bullshit, but that's all I got. I told you man, I'm no good with this kind of stuff..."

"I'm sorry," I told him, since I hadn't really said it yet.

"I know," he sighed. "Me too."

He clapped me on the shoulder then, brotherly and rough, and it was almost like nothing had happened between us at all. He turned away from the mountain, the morning, and headed back into the trailer.

"Come on back inside for a bit. I'm gonna make you a mean jalapeno omelet before you go." He looked back over his shoulder. "You coming?"

"Right behind you," I said, as if I were happy, but neither of us believed that. I gave him another skin-deep smile, and the door snapped shut behind him.

***

I thought about driving through Meter on my way back down to campus...thought about seeing his grave for myself, pissing on it even...or maybe just seeing his house again, with a FOR SALE sign out front, and all the windows boarded up...as if some part of me wasn't scared, or hopeful, that they wouldn't be boarded up at all. Maybe it would still be there, waiting for me to come around...that shadow in the front window of the house, standing tall this time, watching me park the car in the garage that had been left open for me...

I drove down the coast instead, trading that long, empty highway for sun, sea breeze, and the smell of dead horseshoe crabs. I'd never taken that route before, and it made it easy not to think about much else.

Campus was pretty dead by the time I got back, which didn't surprise me. Fall classes wouldn't start for a while yet. I busied myself with unpacking the car, taking my time...until I got to the suitcase full of clothes in the trunk, and remembered what was inside.

I took it up to my room, locked the door, and opened it. The letter jacket was there, folded up and properly dry cleaned. Russell's jacket.

I'd meant to give it back to him...and I would have, if not for all the goddamned crying, and the sex, and the rest of the goddamned crying...and now I was crying all over again, zipping up the suitcase, wishing I could just forget. I crawled onto the bed's naked mattress, ready for oblivion...and oblivion was ready for me...

A webway of worn-down roots covered the black dirt and every wet stone slab along the path, cradling them, choking them. It was treacherous, so I kept my eyes on the ground at my feet instead of Rusty's enticing ass, meaty globes shifting against clingy, sweat-damp cargo shorts.

"Not far," he called over his shoulder, steadily climbing, and we were both already panting and dripping with rivers of sweat. My calves and hamstrings were about ready to fall off by the time we reached the summit, and my feet were definitely starting to blister in Russell's old boots - but damn, it felt good to be hiking again.

"Take a look," he was saying, standing at the edge of the drop off. I joined him there, taking in the rolling emerald vistas, a sea of mountains and valleys heaving under a perfect, blue-white sky.

It was truly breathtaking, utterly surreal, and I was calm for the first time in a long, long time...until I saw a dull, hairy figure, black against the green. It was deep down in the gorge below, nearly lost in the shadow of the mountain...barely a spec from that height, much too far to make it out clearly...but I knew exactly what it was, and I knew it was looking right at me.

"Do you see it...?" I asked Russell...but he was still lost in the sunset, and I didn't want to bother him, so I kept my mouth shut.

"Come here," he was saying, so I went. He was naked now, and I was too. The rocks were perfectly smooth on our bare feet, and the dirt was soft and moist, yet it didn't stick to our skin at all as we sank down into the roots. He opened his legs, pulling me into his lap to face him, thick shaft running up against my tingling perineum...now grinding our cocks against each other, belly-to-belly...face to face...man to man...

"Stay with me..."

"Okay," I panted, vision blurring, swelling up from below.

"Stay with me," he whispered again, hot in my ear, real enough to believe...and I came just like that, and the world was an infinite bloom.

I leaned back, fists planted in the dirt, arms wobbling as the last of my orgasm gurgled out of me, spreading all over our slippery cockheads as his feather-light grip flew over them. His other hand left my neck and slipped down my throat, my nipples, and closed over the meaty column of my crunched abs. His callused thumb dug into my navel, squelching out the cum and sweat that had pooled there...and my entire body was shuddering, heaving in his grip...but I could still feel its eyes on our flesh.

It was closer now, hovering just beyond the clearing over Russell's blushing pink shoulder...a hairy, hulking thing at the edge of the forest. It went on staring at us for a time, blinking its red-blue lights, until the light left the sky entirely, and the night closed in...until it finally took one last long, baleful glare, and turned its back on me for good. I watched it slither into the infinite darkness between the trees, drifting up into the starry void beyond, gone...and then Russell's hands were closing over mine, rough and callused, yet smooth all the same...

I woke up slowly, bitterly, because I didn't want the dream to be over.

I was face down on the mattress and sticky in my jeans, where a pool of drying jism was already fusing my boxers to my pubes. I was used to such vivid, unsettling dreams by then...but that one was the most intense by far. My brain was tormenting me with the way things could have gone, crushing itself under its own weight...but at least it had been a nice dream, all things considered. Dreams weren't always so nice.

I got up and stumbled through the shadows, into the bathroom, and slurped lukewarm water straight out of the faucet until I wasn't thirsty anymore. I undressed mechanically, reflexively, and the shower was running, turning the bathroom into a pitch black womb of steam. I didn't bother turning on the light.

The water was searing hot by the time I stepped into it, sending ripples of red across the darkness behind my eyelids, but I let it burn my skin. I wasn't thinking about my body...I was thinking about his.

I could almost see it even now, tinged with soft, silvery light from the window, standing right there in the doorway of the bathroom. A void in the shape of a man. It loomed in my vision, in the back of my mind, grinning at every tiny flinch and quiver of my naked, reddening flesh, savoring my pain...but it wasn't making me hard. Not this time, anyway. It just made me angry...angry, and sad.

"I wish that really was you," I told the empty bathroom, and the thing that wasn't there. Strangely, I actually meant it. There was so much I wanted to tell it, so much I wanted to make it understand...and so many things I wanted to understand myself, things that only it could ever tell me...

"Why did you come to my dorm that night?" I asked, wishing it could answer. "I always thought you were there to arrest me, or...kill me...but I never asked you, did I? I just sent you that text." I was soaping myself up, not waiting for a response, letting the words drip out of my swelling throat. "But you could have just been there to...to talk. Right? And I would've told you to fuck off...I hope I would have, anyway, but still...you could have just been there to talk. And now I'll never know."

I looked past the shower curtain, beyond the billowing steam, and tried to believe it was listening. "Don't you think that's a shame...?"

It didn't answer me, of course, because it was nothing but a shadow now. Shadow and memory.