Calling Hours
Listen to the author read “Calling Hours” at The Blackstick Review launch event in May 2017. Story begins at 1:50-
1982
An alligator under a home is a harbinger of death in New Orleans, but by the time an alligator crawled beneath Beau Aucoin’s front porch, the man was nearly gone. The reptile crept beneath the oak planks and marinated itself in the dust of Louisiana that pushed between cracks in the floorboards by the thick soles of work boots. Todd Becker had not set foot onto Beau Aucoin’s lawn before he was greeted by the true nuisance: the ninety-year-old neighbor who’d called Louisiana Fish and Wildlife sixteen times in two hours, complaining that she couldn’t tend to the hostas on the side of her house with the creature under the neighbor’s deck.
“You gon have to get him out of there, sugar,” the white-haired neighbor pointed to the front porch, “I tried to ring the owner ten times, but I didn’t see one light go on. That’s why I kept calling.”
“I’ll take a look, ma’am,” said Todd, who peered through the slats beneath Beau Aucoin’s front porch to see the complaint. The four-foot reptile was still in the shade, its eyes forward and glazed. This was the animal caused the phone of Louisiana Fish and Wildlife to ring with such fervor that it caused profane outbursts from his boss. The onslaught of calls began at 8:00am, the minute the office opened, and persisted until 1:14pm, when the Director bellowed at Todd to see to it.
“I think he got himself stuck himself down there.”
“Looks like it, ma’am.”
“He’ll prolly be alright now, huh?”
“Sure, he’ll be fine. He’s small enough that we can just release him.”
“Where you from, babe? Not from here.”
“Minnesota, ma’am.”
“Well, ain’t that something? You don’t have to ma’am me, either. Call me Rhoda.”
Rhoda gasped when Todd looped a harness around the small gator’s snout and pulled the spinning creature through the slats on the side of the porch. She coached him through the process, reminded him to be careful, and jumped when the scaly snout emerged, covered in debris, into the sunshine. The entire procedure took fifteen minutes, but would have taken less had Rhoda not commanded Todd to stop and listen to the coughing upstairs.
“Pneumatic, babe. Only twenty-eight, you know that?”
“That’s young,” Todd said. The cough sounded like suffering as it rang through the open window and into the driveway.
“Can’t get out of bed. Fairy lover of his comes and takes care of him, ain’t that awful? He hasn’t tended that garden of his in the backyard for four months now.”
“Huh,” Todd said.
Rhoda paused. It was rare to find a person in New Orleans inclined to so few words, even if he was from out of town.
“You ain’t a fairy, are you?” she asked.
“I—uh, well—”
“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. You don’t know him, do you?”
“No, I—”
“We’ll get along fine as long as you get this gator out from his porch and don’t give me that gay cancer, honey.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
*
An hour later, after it was wrangled out from under the porch and into Todd’s van, Todd set the alligator on a patch of grass that sloped gently toward the green swamp. The animal shot into the water, the rhythmic swerve of its spine reminiscent of a snake, and after gaining some distance away from his captor found a cypress log on which to bask. From its perch, the alligator gazed at Todd, forlorn. As an omen, it had failed. Beau Aucoin was soon to die, and it seemed the creature was the last to know.
*
“You didn’t see him, did you?” Ian asked when Todd revealed he’d visited Beau Aucoin’s front porch. Ian leaned against the fridge and ran his fingers through his hair, “It’s too hot in here, you’d think we could afford air conditioning with how much you work.”
“He couldn’t come out,” Todd said, cutting celery in rhythm to a tape playing in the next room, “And there was Rhoda.”
“Who’s Rhoda?”
“The next door neighbor with a phone problem.”
Beau was a fairy indeed; the sort that could teach you how to fly. Beau and his partner, Gabe, taught Todd how to go about being gay in the South nearly ten years ago, while Todd was still a student at Tulane. Todd knew the sound of Beau’s laugh, and the Cajun way of speaking that fit his baritone so well. Beau gave him cooking lessons when Todd first moved to New Orleans, and taught him everything he needed to know to make dinner for two, for six, for eighteen. He taught Todd the proper way to tell a story; it must contain something of a paradox, and must begin with “Y’all ain’t gon believe this.”
“You could have seen him. You were at his house,” Ian said, pacing back and forth in the kitchen, “Gabe said he looked bad. I just want to see for myself, you know?”
“She knew about the gay cancer, you know,” Todd scraped the celery from the cutting board into a pot on the stove. It was Beau who had taught him the Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking: celery, onions, and bell peppers. He scraped the Father into the pan, took out two Sons, and peeled off their outer layer of skin. The red and green Holy Spirit would have to wait until the first two boiled down in the broth.
“Couldn’t you have just asked to visit him, even for a minute?”
“Ian, even if I could, I couldn’t have,” Todd said, opening a package of grey prawns and laying them out on the cutting board, “I can’t have everyone knowing that—”
“That you’re gay? You must be pretty cautious then, hiding me from an old woman like that.”
“It’s not that. No. It’s—”
“If you want to hide me, Todd, you’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than—”
“Ian, not you.” Todd put down the knife and gave Ian a kiss on the forehead. Todd treated a kiss on the forehead like a baptism, a reversal of his Lutheran upbringing. His lips touched to Ian’s forehead and Todd renewed his love for the man as if it was his first encounter with tenderness. He smelled the light scent of Ian’s shampoo as he brushed his hairline with his nose and held Ian’s face between his hands. The stubble tickled the tips of his fingers, “Not you, never you.”
“What, then?”
“People think I know every gay man in this goddamn city, Ian, I—”
“We do.”
“And if they know we do, then…then they’ll think we might be liable to, you know—”
“Catch AIDS?”
The rich brown broth bubbled over the side of the pot and sizzled as it ran down the side of the iron and onto the iron stovetop. The metal wheezed and concoction let off a light smoke. Todd bent over it and pursed his lips together. He blew the smallest, coolest stream of air he could to calm it, when he felt Ian’s hands slip into the belt buckles on either of his hip bones. Ian’s breath chilled the back of his neck, and he whispered into Todd’s ear: “What say we go out tomorrow night?”
Todd turned around, “I don’t see how that’d help Beau Aucoin.”
“Well I’m not in love with Beau Aucoin, am I?”
*
“Them squirrels are down there. In a box on the floor,” a woman pointed to the basement door of her home. The urgency in her eyes insisted not upon the presence of rodentia, but a demon.
“They won’t hurt nobody, I been good to them,” called a boy from behind the shelter of his mother’s body. His mother squeezed the thin bones of his wrist into submission and away from the colony he’d raised in the basement.
“A month he’s had them down there! You see them? You see them?” The woman yelled down the bannister at Todd.
“Yes ma’am!” Todd shouted up the stairs. A trap in his hand, he placed the metal cage on the floor and nearly thrust the box into it whole, but he stopped short. Two eyes poked out of the seams of the closed cardboard. They blinked. Todd used his pinky finger to push aside the stiff cardboard to reveal a mother and her two babies.
“I can’t believe you touched them, Augie,” He heard the woman upstairs say to her son.
“I helped her get healthy again, Momma, that’s why she came in, anyway. She couldn’t find—”
“Augustus Gaudet, I have heard enough of your critter keeping!”
The little things clung to their mother’s nipples, suckling with closed eyes. The squirrels were accustomed to human contact, catered to by a four-foot butler. The mother brushed her ear into the side of the box and nestled into the corner of the cardboard, resigned to be pampered by the loving hands of a human. Todd closed the lid of the box and slid it into the metal enclosure. He carried it up the stairs to the fighting duo.
“Momma, just look at them, they’re—”
“Cullion! They gon have to die because you were touching them, you understand that, boy?”
At that, tears swelled. They pooled in his brown eyes and dripped down his lean cheekbones. Augie broke into a fit of sniffles and hyperventilation, his chest heaved as a light drip of snot ran quickly from his nose to his lips.
“That ain’t true, is it, sir?”
“Did you feed them?” Todd asked, “You pet them, put your hands on them?”
“They needed me,” the boy cried, “I thought they needed me!”
“And now, Augie, they gon have to put them down,” his mother said, her fingers still overlapping around his wrist, “I told him that when I found them, too, I know what y’all have to do and the boy needs to learn not to go raising wild animals in my house. Lucky he don’t get rabies. Lucky I don’t.”
Todd backed away from the boy and his mother and turned to the front door. In the short hallway between the kitchen and the foyer, Todd realized his motions were tracked by the immense presence of eyes. The hallway’s walls were covered in family photos, tracking the growth of Augie and the growth of his mother and father, hanging in stills on yellowed floral wallpaper. Todd sometimes wondered what it would be to have a wall of photos to commemorate his potential accomplishments: a child, a marriage, the clean appearance of being posed. All three members of the family had the same brown eyes, nearly indistinguishable from the pupil. Otherwise, Augie was a mix of features: his mother’s lips, his father’s ears. Todd pondered what his own child might look like. Ian had blue eyes. Todd wanted to mix his own features with Ian’s, plucking his favorite attributes of them both; he wanted to mold his child, press his freckles firmly, gently, on the child’s cheekbones, fan Ian’s eyelashes with the light touch of a thumb onto a canvas that mixed the shades of their skin like oils. But that was not how life was made. He twisted the door handle and bounced the cage of squirrels on his knee as he trotted down the steps.
The boy broke free from his mother’s grip and flew down the front hallway, knocking down a framed family photo when he clumsily slapped against the wall. “Boy, did you break my good frame?” screeched his Momma from the kitchen.
“You gon kill them?” Augie shouted as he ran out onto his front lawn, where Todd was loading the truck.
“We might have to, buddy,” Todd frowned at the child, “I’m sorry.”
“The momma never bit me or nothing. They’re good!” shouted the boy, his face gone vermillion in his grief.
“I know, but touching wild animals is dangerous even if they don’t bite you. Sometimes they start to rely on you, and that means they can’t be wild anymore.”
Augie’s breathing calmed, and the boy stood as tall as he could. His chest puffed, and through Augie’s orange T-shirt, Todd could make out an outline of his collarbones. “Not everybody’s got to be wild, sir.”
“Maybe somebody could adopt one of them,” Todd said with an upward inflection. It was illegal to own any exotic or wild animals in New Orleans, but lying with the intention of appeasement was the extent of Todd’s parenting skills.
“Will you?”
“Will I—oh, no, I can’t, I—”
“Augie!” his mother shouted shrilly from the doorway, “You get in here and pick up this glass, boy. Let that pédé to himself.”
*
“Hey, dears,” Gabe hugged Todd and Ian when they walked into the club. Past his smile, Gabe’s expression was wrought with worry. Beneath the backbeat of Hall & Oates was an undercurrent of official and dire business. As Beau Aucoin’s partner, Gabe was unsure of his own prognosis. No one knew how it was transmitted, but all looked on. In the beginning, when they’d first seen the New York Times article two years ago, they thought it might have been poppers. And then it was the bathhouses, the drugs. There was a test done that found cells of the virus in saliva; a kiss with the wrong man could turn a person into a time bomb.
“You want a drink?” yelled Ian. Todd shook his head, Gabe nodded, and Ian gestured to the bar, where Todd knew Ian would order a Sazerac. Ian was partial to rye whiskey and even more enamored with absinthe, and he imbibed in his version of ambrosia nearly every time they went dancing. Todd watched them hail the bartender and turned away. He danced in place and glanced around club, at its neurotic lights. For the first time, Todd inhaled deeply enough to register the club’s scent—that of a locker room, thick with bodies and cologne.
Fifteen feet away, blocked by two couples and a speaker, Todd saw him. He was sculpted in the eye of the Greeks, carved from marble and endowed with sentience. An Adonis. Todd hadn’t thought of Greek art since college, but of this artisanal craftsmanship he was sure. He was drawn to the jagged jawline, the deep-set eyes, overcome by the need to prove the man was tangible. The man was familiar, but Todd could not figure out if it was because he was a person he’d met before, or if he was merely Todd’s idea of beauty embodied. As the bass of the song pumped through his feet, he gave into gravity. Todd watched his arm stretch and place itself on the thick muscle of the man’s shoulder. The Adonis turned, blinked. Todd’s hand fell from his shoulder and discovered a new resting place: the tight cloth of a white tank top. He ran his hands up the Adonis’s body, trapped in the distant memory of him.
Todd closed his eyes and could see the pulsating strobe light through his closed lids. He craned his neck backward, letting the lights flash—black, red, black, red—through the capillaries in his eyelids in a fiercely biological glow.
Todd’s lips flew onto the Adonis’s, and Todd imagined himself somewhere else. In this man’s embrace, Todd left the club altogether and instead stood in the shadow of a glowing skyline, the tall buildings twinkling somewhere infinitely far away, a place where it was alright to be completely alone in the arms of someone else.
And his lips were silk and his eyelashes beat against the top of Todd’s cheekbone and Todd forgot what it was to be full of someone else, to meld one’s own solitude into another.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Todd?” Ian’s cracking tenor rang from the bar. Todd’s already racing heart pounded in his temples. He pushed on the Adonis’s pectorals and backed himself between bodies in the club. The skyline shattered and Ian grabbed his shoulder.
“What just happened?” Ian demanded, “Are you serious?”
“I—I don’t know. I’m sorry,” Todd answered.
“Damn right, you’re sorry, Todd. Jesus. I’m going home. Have fun giving us both—”
“Ian.” Ian paced away from Todd the door when Todd caught his shoulder. The bare skin of Ian’s shoulder burned from the heat of the surrounding bodies. The dance floor evoked a natural sweat.
“Don’t you fucking touch me. I’ll see you at home.”
*
“And why’s he pitching a fit?” Beau Aucoin asked when Todd approached his hospital bed. Ian glared at Todd and shuffled into the hallway, determined not to share space. He was surprised Ian came at all, let alone tolerate Todd in the same car as they’d driven over. It was too quiet in Beau’s hospital room; Beau loved Barbara and Bette too much to have such a sonic vacancy. Todd wished he could have visited Beau when he was home; he seemed so uncomfortable and small in the white room.
“I kissed someone,” Todd said.
Beau guffawed, and the wheeze from his lungs turned quickly into a cough. Todd loved the sharp cut of Beau’s laugh—it was as if even Beau was startled by its might. It was muffled, but very much alive inside him. “That’d do it, Todd.” He spat into a handkerchief, “Never thought you much of a wild thing, boy.”
“I’m not! Or I wasn’t until now, at least.”
“We might just be roommates if he kicks you out,” Beau chuckled, glancing about the room, “Now they’re saying it might go through saliva, you now.”
“Oh, I know. Why do you think he’s not talking to me?”
Beau stared at Todd. “Heard you met the Rhoda.”
“Did I ever meet Rhoda.”
Todd heard a small clatter behind him. In a wooden chair in the corner of the room, Beau Aucoin’s momma dropped her rosary beads on the floor. She was mousy, the shade of her hair matched her khaki pants. She hunched over to pick up the beads and met Todd’s gaze as she sat up straight in her seat. Her eyes held anger—they burned behind the brown irises.
“Hello, ma’am, I didn’t see you there,” said Todd, extending a hand, “I’m Todd Becker, a friend of your—”
Beau’s momma ignored his hand and instead clutching her rosary in both hands. Her stringy hair brushed her fingers when her head bent in prayer.
“Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâces, le Seigneur est avec vous,” she whispered, pinching a bead between her slight fingers. Todd could clearly see each knuckle as she made her way up the necklace.
“She don’t approve of me, but she’s got to be here to pray,” Beau said, rolling his eyes. “Won’t touch me,” said Beau, “Pretends like I don’t notice, Todd, but she hasn’t since she walked in.”
At this, his mother stood up. The hollows of her cheekbones stood out as she spoke; Todd could recognize the skeleton beneath her thin skin.
“I will not die for your crimes,” she burned. Beau Aucoin’s mother clumped the string of beads in her hand and glided from the room. Todd could see the cross at the end of the rosary poking into her palm, lightening her skin under its pressure.
“Jesus can’t clean up a dead body, Momma!” Beau yelled, and burst into another fit of his wet cough. Beau’s body surged forward in his fit, and the open back of his hospital gown revealed a multitude of red and purple sores. There were two small spots on Beau’s face, but the sight of his back sent a series of shivers down Todd’s spine.
“You don’t have to sit up with the dead if they ain’t dead yet, boy,” Beau said, the side of his mouth cracking into a weak smile, “I’ve chased the two of them off. What’ll it take to make you leave me be?”
“Cher and a Hawaiian vacation,” said Todd.
Another cough ensued. “Cher. Share,” Beau imitated Todd’s accent, moving his lips slowly, “The only cher you ever had was the one who loved Sonny. Damn Yankees.”
“I’m not a Yankee either,” Todd snickered.
Beau Aucoin paused and a meek expression washed over his face.
“Was he beautiful?” Beau asked, adjusting his blanket to cover his right foot.
“Who?”
“The boy you kissed.”
“Oh,” said Todd, “Well, sure, I guess.” Todd didn’t mention the way the smell of his breath was stuck in his head, sneaking from his memory into his nose every few minutes.
“I haven’t kissed Gabe since, well—tell me, Toddy,” Beau said, “What’s it like to kiss somebody? It’s been months.”
“What do you mean it’s been months? Can’t Gabe—“
“I pay far more attention to the art of dying than making passion marks, boy. I hardly ever let him.”
“You’re not going to die, Beau.”
“What’s a kiss like?”
“It’s warmer than you’d think. And softer. He had these soft lips, must’ve used chapstick or something, I swear.”
“What else?” asked Beau, “What’s it like to breathe when you’re kissing somebody?”
The Adonis’s smell returned to Todd’s nose. “You can’t. You don’t remember to. I had to tell my lungs to work.”
“Maybe it’s like having AIDS, then?” Beau snorted.
And Todd had a fit of his own. “It’s like this,” he grabbed either side of Beau’s face and pressed his own lips against Beau’s. They were chapped, cracked from pneumonia and frequent retching. He breathed in the smell of the hospital and a touch of liniment. Todd was electrified in the ache of madness; he wanted to kiss Beau so hard that he might remember the shock of what it was to be alive. He tasted salt and broke away.
They wept to each other.
“You’re a wild thing,” said Beau.
“It’s not because I—”
“I know why.” Beau said, sniffling.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
1983
It was some time before the alligator roamed from its cypress log and back into the city, but there were porches to attend to. It was sheltered in part by decks of New Orleans architecture, but was largely ignored by the sick who dwelled stories above. They were not threatened by the predator because they were already being eaten. When it was time, the alligator moved on. It traveled through the concrete foundations of homes, stopped, listened for a cough, a moan, the sharp inhale that precedes weeping, and inched through each Ward. Beneath funeral homes, it hummed hymns and giggled to itself.
Beau Aucoin’s funeral was the first of 37 Todd and Ian attended that year together.
The funerals of their peers were quieter than what Todd expected: there were few casseroles, no second lines or brass bands. Celebration of life was merely verbal; anything more and they remembered just how cheated they were. The art of the Southern funeral was abandoned; there was no time for art in the age of tragedy.
The air in every funeral home, Todd discovered, was thicker than any he’d held in his lungs before; Todd had been through August in Louisiana, and still the black air of every funeral home went down with a special sort of choke. He suspected it was because the air was so self-contained, twice breathed particles floating, spinning in and out of people’s bodies united in death. Beau’s momma was at his funeral, but didn’t speak. She stayed at the back of the room, right hand perched on the back of her husband’s metal chair, the left surely clutching a rosary. Her jaw was clenched. It opened occasionally to mumble what Todd was sure was a prayer, and closed again so tightly it made deep divots in her temples.
Neither Todd nor Ian remembered much of what was said at Beau Aucoin’s funeral. It was the blur that funerals are promised to be. The black coffin at the front of the parlor and the memory of dim light were what death was supposed to feel like: empty. They had time to honor the rip of grief against the skin, raw and chapped. Beau Aucoin’s funeral was the only one that hurt like it should.
And soon it was a procession of eulogies. At the front of every room, every church—gay-friendly church, unless they forgot to tell their mommas—was a space of devotionals and anger and dim light that was numbing not because of grief, but because it was familiar. It was remembering the sensation of the last of your oxygen exiting the body without ever experiencing its absence. They watched each other bleed.
Here was the smell of fresh lilies, of red wine and old Bibles with yellowed pages. Here were the words from the yellowed Bibles, spoken to the people who cried or couldn’t cry anymore. The words from people who wrote their own scripture. Here were the words that formed a cocoon around 1983, a dark comfort that enveloped them and had the audacity to ask them to grow wings:
Of Kenny Lemaire:
Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer; from the end of the earth I call to you when my heart is faint. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I
Of John Pitard:
am not a victim of AIDS. I am a person with AIDS who has never seen the love of my life look more beautiful than when he was at peace, right now, before you today. I’ve been told it is a risk to love, but it’s a greater risk not to. Thank you, John, for
Of Kevin Schmitt:
being my son. For your humor, your laugh, the way you loved to bake. I’m surprised we didn’t know more about you sooner, Baby, the way you made pecan pie so well since you were eight years old. I never thought—I never thought I would have to bury a child. I’m sorry, I just—
Of Michael Villemare:
don’t understand why this is happening. This doesn’t make any fucking sense. What did we do? God, I never cry. I’m sorry. Jerry, read this for me. Jesus.
Of Adam Agnew:
And we pray to the Lord from Psalm 134: I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret.
Of Lionel Rosier:
Fearfully and wonderfully made includes the dark corners we hide in.
Of Byron Martin:
I love you. Which is to say, I never thought I’d have to say goodbye to you. Which is to say, I didn’t tell you enough—I’ve spent moments not declaring it, letting other words leave me when really all I meant was you, you, always you. I’ve spent moments not fighting for you, I’ve spent time fighting for no one at all. And when it comes time that I am next in line, Byron, I promise that I will look into the eyes of the future saying only your name. Because
Of Joel Vincent:
we are the ones who God forgot. But I will not forget you, Joel, and nor will anyone in this room. I will scream until someone hears us all. And—and, I’m sorry. We will remember you as we hold onto each other and ourselves. Joel, you’ve proven it. We’re all the God we need.
Gabe died in late August, and by that time everyone learned to sweat out their tears in the humidity. To be under the sunlight was gruesome, but inside was far worse. Todd and Ian wandered through the rooms of the funeral parlors, now as familiar as their favorite restaurants. Ian could tell Todd where the bathroom in every gay-friendly funeral parlor in New Orleans was and which directions he’d have to turn to get there with little thought. They started to notice the different smells of the parlors—some were tinted sweet with the perfume of lilies or magnolias in their front rooms to make the space brighter. The less often visited parlors were of a sourer persuasion—musty, aged, like most of their patrons, undoubtedly.
The most memorable one, olfactorily speaking, was a parlor that Todd swore to Ian all four times they visited smelled like his mother’s rosewater perfume. He called them occasionally, his mother and father in Crookston, but never discussed anything of value—only the weather, his job, his father’s farm, slowly dying as his eight siblings moved out of the state. Of what they were all truly wondering—Ian, AIDS, the Bible, health—they never spoke. The scent of rosewater in the funeral home was the first time Todd mingled the scent of his mother with the idea of death. The owners had a French name, as many did, and Todd nearly forgot the name—Charbonnet’s? Chandonette’s? Ian was better with remembering names than Todd was, let alone the silent syllables of the French language, lurking within words’ roots in the ground: enough to stumble, but usually not enough to fall.
Ian got a call about Gabe when Todd was at work, and had just finished crying when Todd got home. Todd rested a hand between Ian’s shoulder blades and rubbed his back when he was told the news, but said nothing. There was nothing to be done anymore except sit at the kitchen table and stare at Ian, wondering what he might eat for dinner. Todd asked where the funeral was to be held and was sickened at his feeling of secret excitement when Ian said the name of the French rosewater parlor. He was afraid of the smell but drawn to it nonetheless; it was childhood with a tint of death, one of the only places he’d ever been to blend his past and his present so perfectly. He knew precisely where it was, he told Ian, because he was better with names than directions, and led them there two days later, on the most humid Wednesday of the summer.
They filed into the funeral home behind a myriad of others, many of them with children in tow, and waited. An older man commented on the pneumonia, as if the ailment were unusual by now, as if the processional no longer simply went through the motions of grief.
Todd took the opportunity to close his eyes and sniff at the rosewater air, to fill his lungs with the scent of home turned macabre. Ian tapped him on the shoulder.
“Honey?” asked Ian.
“Hm?”
“Look around. What do you see?” Ian said, and darted his eyes about the room in panic.
“A funeral, Ian,” said Todd, who snorted.
“Okay,” said Ian, agitated, “What do you not see?”
There were men and women, children running between lines of chairs because they knew they would have no memory of this occasion.
Todd stared at Ian blankly.
“Todd, Honey, where are, you know—the other gays?”
He peered about the room, now aware of the glaring issue. The men were universally hairy and unfit, their large hands clasping the smaller hands of their wives. The wives wore black dresses that matched the men’s black suits; they lined the room in heterosexual units. Todd’s eyes grew wide.
“Jesus Christ,” said Todd, “We’re at a straight man’s funeral.”
“Todd, we’re at the wrong funeral.”
“But he’s pneumatic, isn’t he? I heard someone say it.”
Todd could feel the bile rise in his stomach as his neck snapped to the wall to look at the pictures of the deceased. He knew from previous visits where the families usually put them—on a side table alongside the wall.
“Shit,” said Todd.
There, on the table, were photos Todd recognized. They were from the walls of the little boy’s house, a year ago now. The one who’d kept the squirrels. What was his name? Gussie? He recognized the boy’s reflection in both of his parents, the way his smile sparkled just like his mother’s, and the way his eyes reflected the man between them, which was what caused Todd’s muscles to freeze. Between the mother and son was, unmistakably, the Adonis. The eyes of the Adonis ripped into Todd’s memory; the Adonis’s seemed to pucker at Todd even now.
“That’s the man from the club,” Todd pointed. Ian’s gaze grew cold when he looked at the picture.
“The one you—”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Ian whispered to Todd as they stood in line, “What a fine reunion it was. We’ve got to leave.”
But Todd knew he would stay. His feet planted firmly to the carpeted floor and wouldn’t move. It was impulse, instinct. Ian stared in disbelief when Todd told him he wasn’t leaving, and after raising a proud middle finger into Todd’s face, Ian rushed out.
“Y’all alright, there?” said the woman before Todd in the receiving line.
“Not good with grief,” Todd said. The woman nodded her head.
It was a closed casket. Todd doubted many of the straight couples and their children knew why, or had ever seen a red lesion on anyone. He wondered if they heard the rattling cough of pneumonia, or the dry lips that he could see now on Beau. Or the jutting cheekbones, the ribs, the frailty and weakness of the failing bodies that kept up such strong beings.
Here were the mourners. The woman, her son, surely some siblings and parents. The wife looked slightly thinner than he’d remembered her—clutching her son’s wrist—but she persevered through the hugs and apologies. He walked up to her, squared his face up to hers. They watched one another. Her stare was blank, and Todd felt a fool for staying at all.
And then, a recognition. Her eyes gleamed as she identified him. “The man with the squirrels,” she said, smiled warmly, and leaned in to hug Todd. She gripped him too tightly. She leaned into Todd’s neck and growled sharply, “How dare you come to my husband’s funeral, you disgusting piece of shit. Get out of here, fucking faggot,” she whispered. Her warm breath bit at his earlobe, and when she released him from their embrace, he saw it: a red mark, doused in tan cover-up as best it could be, on the tip of her nose.
Her teeth gritted into a smile that was too wide and her eyes fixated on him as prey. To Augie’s mother, Todd was her occasion, the only one of his kind at the funeral; the only suspect caught under the bright white of her flashlight at the crime scene that she knew would leave her son an orphan. Pédé, she called him on her lawn. He’d inferred what it meant, and vaguely remembered the term thrown at him before. It was Todd, Todd who was to blame for the words she would share at her husband’s eulogy, echoed from other funerals Todd and Ian attended within the last month: the same Bible verses, the testament of remembrance and love that was present with every passing. She would see Todd as the cause, eventually, of the eulogies delivered at her own funeral, looming ever closer with the lesions that popped up her her chest that Todd would never see because her dress’s high neckline.
Todd left before the service started. He avoided the broad shoulders of the suited men, coming to pay their respects and sign the guestbook. He avoided looking at the women, all glancing in sympathy to the widow in black across the room. The mark on the woman’s nose contained a future of which only she and Todd were aware, a future that would spread and evict her from her own skin.
Todd laid his hand on the door frame to the outside. He glanced quickly back to the mother, who had her arms wrapped around a portly gentleman in a grey suit. She tilted her face upwards so she wouldn’t disturb her makeup.
As he stared, Augie weaved between the black suit jackets and handkerchiefs to the door of the funeral parlor. The boy was just short enough to be missed moving through a crowd. It was his father’s funeral, but allegations such as these could not wait. He tugged on the bottom of Todd’s suit jacket.
“You didn’t adopt them, did you?” Todd turned to see Augie standing at his waist, flashing the Adonis’s eyes at him.
“What?” asked Todd.
“The squirrels. Momma said you couldn’t have squirrels in New Orleans when I told her you were going to adopt one,” Augie said, and his jaw clenched, “Why did you lie to me?”
“I didn’t—” Todd snapped defensively, but quickly softened. “I’m sorry.”
“Momma said he’s not coming back,” Augie said. Tears welled in his eyes and spilled out slowly, “Just like those squirrels you took.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It ain’t because I touched him, was it?” Augie sniffled, his face reddened like it had when Todd loaded the squirrels into the truck.
“No, Buddy,” said Todd leaning down and patting the boy on the arm.
“I thought he needed me, too.”
“He did,” said Todd, now holding the boy in his embrace. For the first time in over a month, Todd started to cry, “He did.”
“Then why’d they die?” Augie cried into his shoulder.
Todd gripped the boy’s face gently between his hands, held onto his chubby cheeks, “Because loving somebody doesn’t mean we get to save them.”
Todd shuddered and knelt on the sidewalk to hold the boy, but all was shattered when he heard the clearing of a throat.
“Augie, boy, I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” said his mother, kneeling and plucking the weeping seven-year-old from Todd’s arms, “Time to go inside.”
And she flashed him the same smile she had not five minutes before, her shining teeth bore helplessness and rage. The family of the Adonis, diminishing by the second, climbed the steps into the funeral parlor and left Todd, alone, on the concrete sidewalk. His knees burned on the granulated pavement, and he stood to walk to Gabe’s proper funeral; catch the end of it, like one might do with a new movie.
And he played on, from one plague to another, where he lived in apology and loved in silence. And somewhere, in the sewers of New Orleans, an alligator sighed.
Kira Yates is a short fiction writer and is currently working on her first novel. Her stories have been previously published in Rapid River Magazine and Potluck Magazine. She is an English and Religion double major at Mount Holyoke College, where she focuses on 20th Century Jewish fiction and Early Christianity. She hopes to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing.