Narrow Rooms Page 7

  The renderer nodded deliberately and again and again like the pendulum of a clock.

  “What will I get out of it, Mr. De Lakes?”

  “Ain’t you got my life already, Roy. I’m where I am today on account of you.”

  “Ho, hear him . . . Here we go again now. . . . ’Cause I got tired of Brian McFee, and give him to you, and you killed him after an argument . . .”

  “You killed both of us . . . Well, stare at me, why don’t you. You know you did. I’m a dead man.”

  The renderer began rolling some grass in a paper he took from another little box. It didn’t take him long. Sidney pretended he was not observing him, but he couldn’t ignore Roy’s putting the lighted reefer in his mouth.

  “Calm down now, Sid, I’ll get your pretty boy back for you.”

  Sidney took a draw of the pot. Two tears streamed down his face.

  “So you don’t deny you’re in love with Gareth, do you . . . I know your type. It was me put old Doc Ulric wise as to there bein’ a need of a new caretaker . . . Gareth’s an even bigger snot than you ever was. Of course his mother is from richer ancestors than your sort of no-­account gentry folks was . . .”

  “Thanks, Roy, thanks,” Sidney spoke bitterly and hopelessly.

  “I love you just the same as I did when I was in junior high school, and was crazy enough to admit it to you then . . .”

  “Go ahead blame me, why don’t you, for inventing the world . . . Go on, why don’t you . . . I get blamed for the sun going down at night and waking folks up in the morning. Go on, heap it on.”

  “How much do you love this Gareth?”

  “Oh, Roy, shit.” After a moment, though, he said, “A lot.”

  “Then I’ll go over and talk to the old lady and see if you’ll have your post back . . . And then you can think about payin’ me something a little later.”

  “I bet.”

  “Thank me, Sid.”

  “Give me some more of your smoke, why don’t you,” Sid said.

  Going up to his guest, he pushed the grass vigorously into his mouth.

  “You weren’t never grateful for anything in your life . . . Even your bad luck has been handed to you and you didn’t deserve it. Even your murder was done for you. . . . But you will be mine yet, do you hear . . .”

  “Yeah,” Sid replied, smoking greedily on the grass and trying, it did seem, to finish it all before sharing any of it again, “I heard you from the beginning. . . . All right, get Gareth back, and you can have me later on.”

  “Will you shake on that, prisoner?”

  Sidney gave him a look he had never given any other human being before, but Roy, though hesitating a moment at such fury, took his hand from him and held it in his in a kind of poorly controlled vehemence.

  Roy put on his old hunting jacket and pulled on his boots. Sidney also rose as he saw his host going toward the door.

  “You wait here now,” he told Sidney. “And you wait till I come back, you hear. If she don’t take you back, well, you can’t very well go home to Vance fired, can you? And if she does take you back, I’ll drive you right over to your . . . Well, what do you call him, did you say?”

  But this time the look on his guest’s face made even him stop.

  “Just to make sure you don’t light out, I will lock this door with a double lock. The sound ought to be familiar,” he added.

  Alone in the renderer’s house, it was as though he was living all over again his life up until he had shot and killed Brian McFee. That is everywhere he looked now he saw, or thought he heard or smelled Brian, who had after all begun by being Roy’s friend, Roy’s boy.

  “I have wrote my name in hell,” Brian McFee had said as he was dying on the sawdust of the floor in the Bent Ridge Tavern. The Doc had heard that sentence but had never repeated it to anybody, but Sidney had heard it too, and it came to him again now as clear and audible as if he was back in the time of the events which had led up to these last words of another boy he had thought he had loved.

  But before the Doc got there Brian McFee had cried out, even though he had his own gun still smoking as a result of his having fired at Sidney several times in the woods, having tried to kill him there, and Sidney had rushed into the Bent Ridge Tavern hardly knowing what he was doing, and it was then Brian’s gun had fallen on the floor, and he had looked into the muzzle of Sidney’s leveled gun and shouted:

  “Don’t shoot me, Sidney, I love you.”

  He had shot him right through the words that still haunted him today, the most perfect words ever said to him.

  “I don’t know why I shot him,” he had once told the prison psychiatrist, “because after all his gun lay nearly empty on the sawdust . . .”

  “I am guilty of murder, not manslaughter,” Sidney had told this doc. “I must find my punishment . . . When I go home I will go to the renderer. . . .”

  “Who is the renderer?” the prison doc had inquired.

  “A renderer is what we country jakes call a man who collects carcasses and puts them in boiling water until they are rendered into lard which he makes into soap for people’s hands . . .”

  “I asked who he was, not what he does,” the psychiatrist interrupted his speech.

  “Oh, you ask who? Well,” Sid stumbled, “I’ll have to sleep on that question before I answer you.”

  In a way this whole story had really begun when Brian McFee (made an orphan very early) had come almost stealthily, like a housebreaker, to stay in the house of the renderer’s son, though he himself had actually a much bigger and newer house left him by his dead Grandpa. The two of them, Roy and Brian, had one thing in common, their love of horses, and it was Roy who had taught Brian to love them. Roy’s father had hardly been cold in the grave when the heir to what was later found to be a fortune took down the sign

  RENDERING, SCISSORS-­GRINDING, CISTERN CLEANING

  and put up the new sign

  STAR-­LITE STABLES, HORSES FOR HIRE

  “There will be no more rendering, Brian.” Roy had kissed Brian impudently, and drew him close to him, as if he would pull him all the way into his ribcage and imprison him there forever.

  The immediate way Roy had got “power” over Brian McFee had been through dope and sex. Brian had got a taste for the latter by going several times to New York City where he had slept in the trucks and docks off West Street, and unaware of any danger had been initiated into almost every experience known there to men who love men, and when he had come back to the “Mountain State” he had made a beeline for Roy, who else? That is, who else was lost to society but the renderer’s son, and as he came through the screen door unbidden he had flashed his schoolboy smile that had done such wonders for him in New York, and he saw at once that cold and hard as Roy was he was just the same a pushover for him, so that they had sat and talked a bit embarrassedly at first, for they both knew what was coming, discussing things like mountain weather, shoeing horses, the upkeep of their cars, until Brian, growing more and more fiercely fidgety, had blurted out:

  “Roy, have you got any dope?”

  Roy had clammed up, then changed the subject.

  But Brian felt that he had to have some before he threw himself at Roy’s feet, which is what he wanted to do; that is he wanted to go over to him body and soul (he had thought this out in one of the empty warehouses off West Street), for he felt he must have a “master” to direct and guide him, he could no longer go on alone as the heir to his dead Grandpa’s fortune.

  Roy meanwhile angered and even a bit scared by this proposition, for Brian, like the De Lakes boys and Gareth Vaisey, came from the right side of the tracks, was old, old American stock, though come down considerably in the world, whilst he, Roy, was looked down upon as perhaps even lower than a nigger or Indian; Roy Sturtevant then waited, bided his time or more truthfully just held his breath.

  “What if I was to say I did have some,” he finally began. “What would you give me in return?”

  Roy had hea
rd of his rich uncle in Key West, Florida, who sent him expensive clothes, gift certificates, and other presents and remembrances from time to time.

  “Money, of course, Roy. I ain’t exactly strapped you know.”

  “I don’t need money.” Roy curled his lip.

  Brian had blushed then and Roy knew he was in love with him, in love with him bad.

  “Supposin’ I did have grass or maybe something stronger, and say I was to give you some, I bet you would go straight and blab it all around, you know you would.”

  This was taking place about a year after the High School Graduation Exercises at which Sidney De Lakes had slapped Roy Sturtevant in front of almost the entire graduating class. (Some say he spat in his direction also.)

  Sometimes at this same period as he lay tossing and turning in his bed at night, Roy Sturtevant would cry out, “Mama, help me!” She had been dead for nearly fourteen years, for Roy was now getting on to nineteen. “You should never have left me, Mama.” She had threatened to do so once when he was only five—that is, one day she warned him she might have to go to the little house that was in the woods, so that forever after when he came upon a deserted house he would right away try to buy it, and then when he was eight she had done just that, had died and deserted him, and had left him abandoned in his house in the woods, while she had gone to some paradise where he could never join her.

  He loved Brian McFee at that moment, as he pleaded for dope, almost more than he had his Mother. For one thing they both had the same kind of tender soft fair beauty and the large luminous hazel eyes.

  “I said, Brian,” Roy stirred from his dream, “what will you give me was I to find you some stuff?”

  “Whatever you ask, Roy. You know I’m not a cheapskate.”

  “I hear an uncle of yours sends you nice clothes from Key West.”

  “Why, sort of nice, yeah . . . He’s not really my uncle, though. He’s a guy I met at a party once in Washington, D.C. Took a shine to me.”

  Roy pulled gently on his left ear lobe.

  “I know you have nice underwear, Brian.” His voice was barely audible.

  “Who told you that?” Brian looked about him desperately, perhaps to see if they were alone.

  “So it’s true then. You do have nice underwear.”

  “How do you know if I do or don’t.”

  “ ’Cause I watched you take a crap once at my place here. When you let down your pants I seen you had expensive stuff on nobody around here ever laid eyes on let alone wore.”

  “Well, is that a crime to go well-­clad?”

  “Putting aside how you earned it, well, no, but maybe, say, I would want it in exchange for my stuff.”

  “Underwear, Roy, for stuff. You do surprise me.”

  “All right, be surprised some more and let me have it.”

  “You’d really take it in exchange?”

  “For a lid, yes, sir, I would.”

  “O.K., when do you want it?”

  “Now.”

  “Don’t you want . . . clean underwear?”

  “I want it now in exchange or the deal is off.”

  “But what are you going to do with it, Roy? I mean—”

  “That’s my business.”

  “All right.” Brian stood up. “Where should I change?” He began looking around him uneasily.

  “You can change right here and now before me.”

  Brian waited only a moment, then began taking off his clothing, but he was trembling something awful. He shook all over. Finally Roy stepped forward and helped him off with the last of his togs. Except he wore his shoes and socks still. He looked painful naked and on the point of almost turning blue.

  But Roy was examining the underwear like a jeweler going through the works of a watch.

  “Don’t you ever bathe, Brian?” Roy spoke at last.

  “Not often, and neither do you,” the boy snapped back at him. “Now give me my stuff, why don’t you.”

  “This underwear is pure silk and imported to boot. Paris, France, huh? Hand-­stitched! What kind of a man give this to you?”

  “Where’s my stuff now, Roy?”

  Roy looked him lazily up and down, making Brian blush furiously again.

  “See that little bureau over there with the glass top to it. You’ll find what you want in the first drawer, in the left-­hand corner. Your lid is waiting there.”

  Brian hobbled over to the bureau. Being naked or ashamed made him walk almost like a cripple.

  He opened the bureau drawer and touched the lid. Then he grinned.

  “And in the third drawer you’ll find some old but clean-­ laundered underwear of mine. We’re about the same size. At least in some places.”

  Brian turned back to eye him wonderingly, then opened this other drawer and hastily put on the clean underwear that belonged to Roy.

  Roy had sat down and was watching him put on his other clothes. Meanwhile he had rolled up Brian’s soiled underwear and put it in a large blue shopping bag.

  “Brian,” he spoke more calmly now, “come over here.”

  “You had second thoughts about our bargain?” the purchaser replied worriedly. “Because if you do you can have more underwear from what I’ve got at home.”

  “I don’t want no more underwear, and you know it . . . I want you.”

  “What does that mean?” Brian said, pouting and his face going all kinds of colors.

  “Quit stalling and playing me for chickenshit, Brian. I know how you got this underwear. . . . Only I love you, do you hear. Do you?”

  “I guess I do,” Brian replied, looking away.

  Roy jumped up and took hold of him and drew him toward him.

  “Don’t hurt me, Roy. Please.”

  “Why do you think I am going to hurt you?”

  “I can’t stand pain, Roy. Please.”

  “Come here, Brian. Sit down on my lap now and get quiet.”

  Brian sat there and suddenly burst into tears.

  “I knew you would get power over me,” Brian said after he had let Roy kiss and hug him and put his hand in his bosom. “I knew this would happen.”

  “Quit blubbering, will you.”

  He had soon undressed Brian all over again but as before he was allowed to keep his shoes and socks on.

  “I will even give you your expensive underwear back if you want it.”

  “No, no, you keep it, Roy. It’s yours by our bargain.”

  Roy kneaded and then almost tore the young flesh that was now abandoned to him. (Brian was then just sixteen and a few days.) And this was the beginning in the boy’s phraseology of “Roy’s having power over him.” The slavery was to sicken both of them, and it was too strong and consuming to last. But through Brian McFee, Roy was to get at “softening up” Sidney who had insulted him publicly and who had for so long “kept power over him” since the eighth grade.

  Two shattering events therefore never left his mind or heart: his mother having gone to “the little house in the woods,” abandoning him thus forever, and Sidney De Lakes slapping him at the High School Graduation Exercises, and these two events, which never stopped in time, kept being projected ceaselessly in his brain like a movie that goes on being shown in a theater throughout eternity, giving him no rest or respite or calm, no momentary quiet, even in sleep or when insensible with what he constantly smoked.

  The night Sidney had slapped him at the High School Graduation Exercises, the scissors-­grinder (as the boys nicknamed him) had come home very late, having sat at the edge of some farmer’s cornfield until the moon rose, and then going into the hall bathroom, had taken the straight razor made in Germany which his Dad had later slashed his own throat with, and had carved out a place by his right eye where the middle finger of Sidney’s hand had struck him, the wedge cut there quite deep so that he would never be able to forget the insult, and tonight as he let his face fall over Brian’s unprotected sex, he put the scar of his self-­inflicted wound directly over the boy’s penis a
nd let it bob there again and again, that was all he seemed to want just then from the terrified, even slightly delirious McFee.

  Then after this peculiar pantomime Brian felt Roy’s mouth take his penis not like a lover, not like anybody who had desired him before but like something not quite human. He suddenly lost his fear of what was happening now through a greater fear of his losing his will power and direction to a man who lived only in the memory of his shame and anger.

  Then abandoning himself in spite of his terror to Roy’s lovemaking, Brian choked and screamed in a sort of piteous pleasure resembling, Roy thought, some small forest animal caught in a trap.

  “Don’t forget you are mine,” Roy had said after they were through, and accompanying him out to the unpaved road which shone white in the darkness. Brian half-­raised his hand to the places on his face where this new lover had broken his skin with his teeth.

  “You can count on me,” Brian had replied, after a wait.

  “And you won’t never go back on me, never, never?”

  Even more than Roy, Brian had no one to hold on to at that moment, and he saw that without Roy and his terrible love, and his obsessive hate for another man, what was there for him but to maybe stay in his own dead folks’ thirty-­room house and die of sheer rich boy’s neglect and aloneness.

  “I won’t never,” Brian said.

  “But you don’t sound like you meant it,” Roy complained, taking him in his arms again.

  “When I tell you you’re all I have,” Brian got out huskily, “I mean it. I ain’t got a soul on earth but you, Roy, so be satisfied.”

  Then he was gone, leaving the older man partly convinced and as much in love with anybody as a damned person can be.

  “But I don’t feel hate toward Sidney,” Brian had said a few days later after they had become “fast lovers.”

  “Yet you always tell me you love me, Brian.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s so.” Brian was then silent. He had explained these silences in a phrase which touched even the scissors-­grinder: “I am searching my heart for an answer.” He had kissed Brian passionately when he said this the first time.

  “Search away,” he had told him, “then know you are all mine.”