by John McManus
Bosie knew his teeth shouldn’t be chattering like a gambler’s dice at ninety degrees Fahrenheit. In the Kalahari in December, frigid cold shouldn’t be slicing through to his bones. Beyond the fire the other safari guests watched him lean in toward the stew pot for warmth. It was to silence his teeth that he took out the root and gnawed on it like the oracle had advised. Stirring the pot, the cook said, “What’s in your mouth?”
Bosie showed him the root. “The healer gave it to me.”
“Is it a turd?”
“It’s the root of a drumstick tree.”
“It looks like a dried-up leopard turd. Is this what will make you a star?” The cook must have overheard his question. Will I ever be famous or is this all worthless? he’d asked, and the old woman had coated his lip scar with root powders and said, Yes, soon your name will be a household word.
A word for what? he replied, but he’d only paid for one question.
Paparazzo. Lolita. What were some more eponyms? Guillotine. Sadist. I’m not contagious, he thought, too weak to say so. With no courage to get tested, he’d never know, but he guessed that his T-cell count was ticking down toward zero. Come closer, it’s only AIDS, he thought, projecting the sentiment across the fire to where the couples sat whispering. They’d uncovered his secret, the one Johanna had tried to explain on the very day when he’d caught the virus. First God had built the heavens and the earth, she had said, but then a mist had risen from the face of the ground, which was the false obscuring the true.
It had happened the week of his mother’s pulmonary embolus. November ‘99, and he’d turned eighteen. Full of rage at Ruth’s condition, Bosie had been out in the swamp, walking off his fury. Fury at how his friends’ moms were healthy and their dads took pride in themselves. Fury at how he’d been praying for a decade and had nothing to show for it. Hiking Washington Ditch that Indian summer morning, he asked, Will you cure Mom ever?
Yes, God had said.
On your own?
No.
So she’s got to act on it.
Yes.
You mean exercise and stuff?
Yes.
She’s too fat for that.
Silence.
Is there an exercise Mom can still do?
Yes.
Which one?
Silence. With God, you could only ask yes/no questions.
Will she exercise?
No.
You mean unless I force her to.
Yes.
So I’ve got to force her.
Yes.
How?
Silence. Bosie rephrased, ruling out methods by elimination, never homing in on answers. Suck my dick, he was telling God by the time he got to Lake Drummond.
Charred pine trees ringed the gleaming lake like Stonehenge pillars. On the shore by a kayak stood a man with hawk-eyes and light brown skin, peering out at the pines. The man turned and said, “Ahoy.”
“Ahoy.” Bosie repeated the odd word.
“Quite a day.” Except for a stranger’s presence in this desolate spot, it was a day like any other. “You know the swamp runaways?”
“Sure.” The forebears of Suffolk. Their shacks were long gone, but you could still find their coins and knife blades.
“I’m researching them for Hollywood. Wait till you hear what they’re paying me.” The man grew a licentious grin. He was in his forties or fifties, but his T-shirt was a boy’s size, and his nipples and muscle ridges showed through.
“What are they paying you?”
“Take a wild guess.”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“Have I seen you at the Wave?”
Bosie didn’t know what the Wave was. “Maybe.”
“Nice to make your acquaintance a second time,” said the man, and sidled closer. Close enough to run a finger along Bosie’s navel.
Electrified, Bosie looked into the man’s hawk-eyes. They were sharp with hunger. The hawk wanted to eat him up. What he’d been dreaming of was happening, and it would have felt glorious but for one thing.
If the dead could look down on you from heaven, who was to say they couldn’t look back across time? What if all the people who weren’t even dead yet, from Johanna to his cross-country teammates, would someday point their periscopes down through the clouds and the years at the middle-aged stranger who was unzipping his jeans? Watching him push Bosie to his knees and position his hands, Johanna would learn how to glide someone back and forth by the hair. She would see how it looked when Bosie wanted someone for real. After the sordid scene ended, she would be in earshot for, “Taking the yacht out at five on Friday. How do you like the sound of a night at sea?”
“I like it,” said Bosie, and took down a marina slip number. He hiked home and drove back to college, where he drank all week and all through Friday afternoon. One good thing about Christian Scientists, they didn’t give a damn about drunk driving. In Johanna’s proving ground of a world, it was fine for any old wino to go racing down I-64; that wasn’t why she stopped Bosie at 4:05 at the dorm-room door and said, “My mom figured out who your dad is.”
“Great,” said Bosie, hand on the doorknob.
“No, not great. She used to read his columns in the Pilot.”
The marina was an hour’s drive away. “And?”
“And she’s scared you and I come from different drafts of the world.”
Bosie checked his watch. “Different drafts of the world?”
“You know how God made the world twice?”
“I thought he made the world once.”
“First was the rough draft. Second time around, certain people got revised.”
“I guess not including me and my dad?”
“First God built the heavens and the earth, and then a mist rose from the face of the ground. That was false obscuring the true.”
“So the false is me and the true is you?”
“That’s what she wants to figure out tomorrow at Carrabba’s at noon. She’s reserved a table.”
“Great, can’t wait,” said Bosie, and then he was out the door. Only on the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel did he realize what he should have done.
He should have told Johanna not to worry what her stupid mom thought! Hugged her and said I know how it feels when someone you love loses their mind. Recounted the day when his dad came home with a chain saw and a plan to saw down the monkey pines and build a Zen rock garden. Those pines were fifty feet tall! Stop, Dad, you’ll kill yourself, Bosie had pleaded while a wild-eyed Henry had strung out extension cords. For years Ruth had had to beg him just to mow the grass. Suddenly if he didn’t clear every tree before sunset, the world would turn to shit. Maybe Henry did come from the first draft of the world. Maybe Bosie did too; maybe Johanna’s mom had sensed how his heart would flutter when he found the swamp man’s yacht, and the swamp man on deck, smiling provocatively down, while asking his leathery-skinned friend, “See, Kyle, doesn’t this look like a fun boy?”
The boat, Bad Latitude, was licensed out of Alexandria. The man, Raymundo, sailed them out past the queue of container ships. In the open ocean he gave the wheel to Kyle and sidled across the prow holding something in the palm of his hand. It was a glass pipe, clear but for burn stains. A fun boy, thought Bosie, high above the whelm of the tide, wouldn’t stop to ask what drug this was. A fun boy would just smoke it.
“Hit this.” Bosie obeyed. It turned him on, doing as he’d been told. “Again, but this time keep it in your mouth, let it seep into your gums.” He followed the instructions. The warm wind scoured him. Drops of sunlight were catching in his pores, drenching him in energy. Soon he was quivering with the need to be naked.
“Boys your age shouldn’t get to wear clothes,” said Raymundo, reading his mind.
Below deck, a black rubber mat was laid out with ball gags, paw gloves, VHS tapes. Gefangen im Analkerker. Arsch Alarm. Der U-Bahn-Fister. After Raymundo and Kyle had strapped him into those paws, they telegraphed with their minds what to do next: bark and wag his plug-tail while two skinheads on TV kidnapped a lad out of youth camp.
As the skinheads hogtied the youth, Raymundo lubed Bosie and mounted him. “How’s that feel?” he said. With the gag in, all Bosie could do was moan.
The pain was piercing. Deep inside him, Raymundo quit pushing and pinned him. Pain gave way to heat waves. His balled-up fists were sweating in the gloves. Back in the dorm right about now, Johanna would be watching Touched by an Angel. Last week, the angels had helped child slaves; this week was about D-Day. He asked God if he would ever be rid of Johanna, and God said,
Yes.
Really?
Yes.
Are you sure?
For the third time, God said, Yes.
How?
Just keep being a fun boy, replied God, giving his first-ever answer beyond yes and no. The yes-no puzzle was solved. The skinheads on TV untied the boy. The D&B breakbeat thumped on, and Bosie swayed like cilia on the earth’s membrane until he slipped out of time.
Cold death. The dark of nothing. His name wasn’t a word. He was dead, and it wasn’t a dream; dreams involved space and time. Here in death, there was no space, no time, no tunnel with a light in it, only cold emptiness forever, but forever was misleading. The better word was never.
He awoke face-down, cheek pressing on a dog bone. The clock said noon. Johanna and her mother would be waiting at Carrabba’s.
The scent of cooked fat cued a pain along the axis of his throat. Unsure whether he or the boat was listing, Bosie stumbled upstairs, where Raymundo was eating hush puppies out of a tub. “Bad news, fun boy, we’re lost at sea.”
“Oh no.” Bosie scanned the ocean. Not a blemish on the horizon, until Kyle pointed over his shoulder at Fort Story’s twin lighthouses. They were half a mile from shore.
Raymundo laughed. “Fun but dumb,” he said, as Bosie shivered. Fever chills, and no mystery as to why. After catching HIV, you came down with the flu. He’d learned about it on Dateline. It was called seroconversion illness, and if he ever touched Johanna again, Johanna would get it too. Since she wouldn’t seek treatment, it would be murder. Her faith prescribed only one treatment, prayer, which was why he might stand to get away with it. Hating yourself for a thought didn’t stop you from entertaining it. Once she was gone, what was a boycotter of medicine like her mother going to do, offer Johanna up to the medical examiner?
John McManus is the author of the short story collections Fox Tooth Heart, Born on a Train, and Stop Breakin Down and the novel Bitter Milk. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, The Oxford American, and many other journals. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award, a Fulbright Scholar award in South Africa, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Literature Award, and a Creative Capital Literature grant. His MFA in fiction and screenwriting comes from the UT’s James A. Michener Center for Writers. http://johnmcmanus.net
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