Xylophone Page 8

  “Come back soon,” Howard said quietly before we left the backroom. “I have a lot more to show you.”

  “Same time next week?” I asked hopefully.

  He answered me with a smile, such an inviting smile. “Whenever and as often as you’d like.”

  As soon as I got outside, I memorized the business hours posted on the upper half of the front door.

  I almost went back sooner than I’d planned, but I didn’t want to seem like a pest. Only little kids were pests. The next time I stopped in, Howard acted even gladder to see me. We cut right to the chase. He invited me to sit on a stool that was placed in front of the xylophone. I climbed up, feeling privileged.

  “Want to give it a try?” he asked, bending toward me. “I’ll teach you a simple tune.”

  “Heck yeah,” I blurted out, and he chuckled.

  “I’m sure the song is familiar to you,” he said, “and probably to most kids in America, but it started as a kind of courtship song, or game. In faraway Germany.”

  The sound of his lowered voice and the feel of his breath against my ear made me a little nauseated. The room was stuffy, and I wasn’t used to any man other than my father and my dentist being that close to me. I didn’t think, This is weird, this is wrong. I just felt unsettled for a minute.

  Pretending to steady me on the stool, he wrapped an arm around my torso. The move startled me, made me jerk. Then I got self-conscious, I thought because I’d been sweating. My tank top felt damp.

  “Comfortable?” he asked.

  “I guess so,” I told him. “But you don’t have to hold me on the stool. I won’t fall off.”

  “I’m just keeping you steady,” he assured me. “You have to be steady to move the mallets over the bars, hit the right notes with the right degree of force.”

  My queasiness morphed into another feeling, a stranger feeling, as he reached around me and lifted one of the mallets. Engulfing me, he tinked out “The Farmer in the Dell.” Introductory verse. Twenty-four notes.

  When he finished, he slid the mallet within my curled fingers and let his playing hand rest in the crease of my thigh, right up against my crotch.

  His playing hand….

  “Go ahead, Dare,” he whispered. “You can do it.”

  He was breathing faster. I felt the heat of his chest seeping into my back, his short beard catching on my hair. And I felt something else, something vertical and solid pressing against the base of my spine. Not just pressing against it, but nudging at it.

  I knew then what was going on, at least in part. That kind of excitement wasn’t unfamiliar to me. I’d felt it myself when I got close to certain boys at school, or paged through teen magazines, or saw cute actors in movies or TV shows. Sometimes, late at night or early in the morning, a pressure bloomed within me, as strong as some heaving of the Earth’s crust. It felt like a mountain was birthing in my pelvis. I’d get stiff and have to give myself relief. And Christ, it always felt so good.

  But this guy behind me wasn’t the boy of my dreams. He hadn’t seduced me with his sweeping eyelashes or long limbs and tight muscles. He wasn’t pouty-lipped, floppy-haired Brad Renfro. Or blue-eyed Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys.

  He was a grown man, this Howard dude, this unlikely new friend of mine. He was large and in charge. I felt small and in his thrall.

  I leaned forward, trying to put some space between us, then laid down the mallet. I braced myself on the xylophone. He didn’t let go of me.

  That’s when I knew. I thought of grabbing the mallet and leaping off the stool and whacking Howard in the eye with the mallet’s hard-rubber head.

  “This isn’t cool,” I said, unable to lift my hands from the xylophone’s bars. They’d grown slick as teeth beneath my palms.

  “What isn’t?” he asked innocently.

  My tongue felt paralyzed. I wasn’t too articulate, so I was afraid of saying something stupid, making a fool of myself and wearing out my welcome. He was an adult, and he owned a really rad store, and he’d been nice to me. Pissing him off or hurting his feelings was out of the question.

  Finally, I improvised an answer. “I… don’t think I can play this thing. It’s nothing like a clarinet.”

  “Oh, come on,” he urged. “Don’t be a quitter. I know you’ll get a kick out of it.” His hands moved on me, shrewdly. Over my chest and belly, over my bare thigh. He damned well knew the sensations would get to me sooner or later—the heat, the hardness, the touching. All that touching…. Shit, I was going through puberty.

  He picked up the mallet and played the same tune, “The Farmer in the Dell.” And played me. Until he was sure I’d keep coming back. Until he was sure I’d be willing to sit on that stool again and again.

  “THE cheese stands alone,” Dare coughed out, unaware he’d started crying, maybe even had been singing as he cried, and that Jonah had gathered him into his arms.

  “No. You’re not alone. You’re not alone. We didn’t know it at the time, but we went through it together. And we’ll finish going through it together.”

  Dare clung to him. The rest of what had happened that June day in 1999 and so many days thereafter swirled like mud through his mind. Only the xylophone stood, stark and immovable, in the center of the blur.

  Dare knew his hatred of it was irrational. He also knew it had a reason. Starting on that very first day, the instrument stopped being an instrument and became an excuse: to go to the resale shop and into the backroom; to sit on that stool and allow Howard Pankin, his “friend,” to do things to him and ask for favors in return. Learning to play the xylophone became a thin but convenient pretense.

  Dare’s ache kept freshening as the mud kept swirling. Jesus, would it never stop? And now, within it, he saw other components too. All the compliments and little gifts Pankin scattered over their encounters, like candy sprinkles over dung.

  Like a rainbow over a dark doorway.

  Like a cheerful chiming sound issuing from a secret space.

  All building blocks in an illusion—of compatibility, of closeness.

  “We’re two halves of a whole, you and I. Beauty and the Beast.”

  Gasping, Dare abruptly pulled back when he heard the voice in his head. He scrubbed both hands over his drenched face. “Oh God. The w-worst part of it is—”

  “I know what the worst part is.” Tenderly, Jonah smoothed the fallen curls from Dare’s temple and forehead.

  More tears flooded out as Dare stared at him, helplessly, gratefully. He was so bleary-eyed, he could barely make out Jonah’s face. But he knew Jonah was there, just for him, without any ulterior motives.

  “The worst part,” Jonah said, “is realizing that in a hidden corner of yourself, you liked it, got addicted to it. Acceptance rather than rejection. Desire rather than aversion.”

  Dare nodded. Yes! his mind shouted. He might’ve had wonderful parents, but they couldn’t keep kids at school from whispering about him, ridiculing him, excluding him. His parents couldn’t make the boys he wanted want him back. They couldn’t even keep his own gay brother from belittling him.

  The best parents in the world couldn’t keep a child from feeling alienated and alone.

  “Pankin owned all the antonyms to all the words that were my enemies,” Dare said. “He made them real. So what if I became a little whore—”

  Jonah cupped his face, looked into his eyes. “You weren’t a whore, Daren.”

  “—because it was the best possible music, that affirming language of touch and flattery.” He was faltering again, stumbling blindly over sobs that scraped his throat raw, stumbling through a minefield of guilt.

  Jonah held his watery gaze. “You weren’t a whore.”

  “But he was paying me, in all kinds of ways! And I wanted what he gave me, and I kept going back for more!”

  There. It was finally out. He’d coughed up that slimy, discolored ball of self-loathing that had rolled around in his gut for thirteen years until it hardened. Then, like a tumor, it
had sent out tentacles that poisoned his whole being.

  He closed his eyes and raggedly sucked air. Jonah held him again, cheek pressed to cheek. When they drew apart, Jonah’s hands firmly enveloped his.

  “You did not want it,” he said in that conclusive, caring way he had that allowed for no argument. “He just took advantage of your vulnerability and made you think you wanted it. Like drugs or booze can make you think you want and need them, even while you loathe what they’re doing to you.”

  Dare opened his eyes. He knew Jonah’s words required his attention. They made too much sense to ignore—especially since they came from a recovering addict.

  “You just wanted to feel good about yourself. That’s all. That’s what you were really after.” Jonah leaned forward and gently kissed Dare on the lips. “As the Reverend Clayton C. Wallace might’ve said, with no awareness of the irony, ‘The Devil is a cunning deceiver’.”

  Dare’s mind didn’t know which to register first: the truth in Jonah’s words, or the message in that sweet, soft kiss.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “EVERY predator,” Jonah said with undisguised bitterness, “has a xylophone.”

  “And what was Wallace’s?” Dare was finally pulling his fractured self together. He’d finally, step by sorry step, begun to make sense of it all.

  The sun slanted farther, falling below the windows. Jonah slid toward an end table and turned on a lamp.

  Jonah

  1999

  IT STARTED with private Bible study. I never questioned why the lessons were one-on-one. Guess I was too focused on feeling special. It’s hard for a kid not to be blinded by positive attention, especially from an adult he idolizes. And one who’s very charismatic, in both senses of the word.

  Clay did have a reason for this instruction. He said I had a lot of catching up to do if I wanted to know, really know the Lord. But his invitation came with a warning: “You probably shouldn’t tell anyone. The other children might get jealous. They might even want to hurt you. Their parents could start turning their backs on you. Even godly people can lapse into pettiness.”

  Those possibilities terrified me—I desperately wanted to fit in—so I kept my mouth shut as I began a new routine.

  On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, I’d walk to the Church of the Living Spirit. There was a room behind the worship area where Reverend Clay said he had “personal communings” with God and worked on his sermons. Nobody was allowed to bother him on those evenings. Nobody. He even locked the place, front and back, to make sure. He kept the blinds closed and the curtains drawn.

  I’ll never forget those ugly old curtains, how I came to depend on them as much as despise them. They were patterned with grinning monkeys swinging from palm trees. Sometimes I swung with the monkeys, carefree and mindless, just to escape. At other times they seemed to be leering and jeering at me. At us.

  Clay had me sit on his lap for Bible study. The way his arm curled around my butt and down my thigh reminded me of the monkeys’ arms. I wasn’t bothered at first. Barely even noticed. I’d sat on Santa’s lap, and this didn’t seem much different, except for the open Bible in front of me.

  The Reverend was slick. He made his moves in small, subtle stages over the course of weeks. Then one day, when I inquired about baptism—because he had a kind of big bathtub or water tank in the church area—he asked if I wanted to see what baptism was like.

  He climbed in with me so I wouldn’t be afraid.

  The communing room and water-filled trough became our playgrounds. He especially loved getting us in the water together. The Bible lessons were dropped. Lessons on becoming a man took over.

  Hallelujah, I was learning how to become a man.

  I still don’t know how he managed to convince me of our godliness. We were God damned, that’s what we were.

  “HE WAS, Jonah. Not you.”

  “I know that now. I even sensed it then. But of all the painful things we resist talking about—we survivors, I mean—that’s the one we resist the most, the fact our bodies sometimes responded, even if we felt sick to our stomachs.” He gave Dare a pointed look. “I suppose I don’t have to tell you.”

  He sure as hell didn’t. Dare’s eyes and gut still ached from his own confession.

  “I’ve thought about that a lot since I got sober,” Jonah said—and it was evident he had. He was reflective, not hysterical like Dare had been. Battling one demon had apparently given him the courage to face another. “How was I supposed to know what that feeling was, the pulsing, shivering weakness that would suddenly sweep through me? I figured it was some sign of grace, of infusion by the Holy Spirit. That’s what it felt like.”

  Dare’s lips twitched, but he couldn’t muster a smile. “For sure.” He couldn’t remember his first orgasm—that kind of thing could happen awfully early in a kid’s life; it was just a physiological response to a stimulus, after all—but, hell yeah, it had been incredible. It had seemed like a gift from God. Dare remembered that much.

  How savvy the monsters were, to use that as yet another snare. Damn, they had so many.

  “I’d never even heard the word for it,” Jonah went on. “Nobody’d ever explained that sensation to me. All I had to go on was what Reverend Clay said, and how my own childish mind interpreted how the Holy Spirit moved in people. I figured everyone who crumpled to the floor during worship was feeling the same thing. Belief was a hands-on experience in Reverend Clayton Wallace’s church. I’d seen that demonstrated week after week.”

  “So that was how he reeled you in, huh? With a Bible and a bathtub.” Dare hadn’t meant to sound flip, but those were the material emblems.

  “Pretty much. Of course the real lure was making me feel like a Chosen One.”

  “And then he relied on pleasure—”

  Jonah’s head jerked up. His face had tightened. “I wouldn’t call it ‘pleasure’. I was too confused and embarrassed to feel genuine pleasure. And later, as I got older”—almost imperceptibly, his chin quivered—“Clay took things further. There was pain. But mostly… there were feelings that were worse than physical pain.”

  Dare was thunderstruck. “Oh Jesus. He raped you?” Just voicing the word made his insides twist. Realizing it had happened repeatedly almost made him double over.

  Pankin had never gone that far. Maybe he’d sensed a streak of feistiness in Dare. But Jonah, it seemed, had been more timid and naïve than he, more compliant. He’d been a true innocent.

  Without any forethought, Dare covered Jonah’s left hand, lying motionless on his thigh, with his left hand, and Jonah absently turned his hand over. Their fingers loosely interlinked.

  “Come here,” Dare whispered, dropping his right hand to Jonah’s shoulder, sliding it behind his back as Jonah rolled toward him.

  They held each other. Dare brought up his legs to lean in closer as Jonah nestled his head beneath Dare’s jaw. Jonah was shaking—minute spasms trembled through his body—but he made no sound save for muted intakes of breath, abrupt quiet gasps as he tried to maintain control.

  “Please forgive me,” Dare said into Jonah’s fragrant hair. He’d rested his face in it without thinking. “I didn’t mean to imply you enjoyed it. God, no, never.”

  After a brief hesitation, Jonah nodded. “I know that’s not what you meant.” The fingers of his right hand curled and uncurled against Dare’s chest until the soft friction made a patch of warmth.

  “He hurt you?” Dare didn’t ask because he doubted Jonah but because he couldn’t fathom it. And because he cared. To the core of his soul, he cared. He loathed the thought of physical injury being added to the scorching of a boy’s spirit.

  “Sometimes,” Jonah said, “but not badly.” He sounded more composed. Maybe too composed. Wooden. Slowly, he pulled back and sat up. “I was older when he did it, was about to turn or had just turned fourteen, I think. And he was… careful.”

  Dare gaped at him. “That doesn’t excuse it!” Don’t get angry with him, you
jackass. Don’t give him even more reason to be ashamed. Goddamn, this was a complex dance. Not stumbling over that fine line between empathy and outrage was the hardest part. Dare tried to distance himself from the outrage, soften the edges of his voice. “How often did it happen?”

  “I-I’m not sure. I always tried to put myself in a different place.”

  “Of course you did,” Dare murmured. “I had a lot of those places.” Where the sounds couldn’t reach, or the feel of what was going on, or the pungent, suffocating smells that seemed a distillation of every odor contained within the junk shop.

  “I was getting ready to end it by then,” Jonah said. “By the time… that began.”

  “Rape,” Dare cut in coldly. “You have to see it for what it is, call it by its name.”

  With a distressed look, Jonah nodded.

  Dare dropped his head against the couch back. Oh Christ, he was making a mess of this. He needed to control himself, be forthright but in a gentle, compassionate way. That was how Battaglia spoke to clients. Getting wound up would only make it seem like he was castigating Jonah. And he wasn’t. He wasn’t. Hearing this shit just made him crazy, even though he himself was every bit as circumspect and prone to euphemisms as Jonah was.

  How, he wondered, could he insist on brutal honesty from others while recoiling from it himself? Why was it so much easier to be outraged on their behalf than on his own?

  “What put you at that point?” Dare asked. “What made you determined to stay away?”

  “Maturity, I suppose. Not that I was all that mature. But I was older. I had more awareness of the situation, knew it wasn’t right or normal. I mean, my peer group was pretty hip—you know?—and by the time I was fourteen, I’d learned plenty in health class about child stalkers and inappropriate touching. There were certain kinds of relationships that were defined by negative words. Those words all fit my situation. But I was so far into by then, and Clay was so good at manipulating me, I still kept it to myself.”