Narrow Rooms Read online

  Then the day came when Roy said to him: “Why can’t my enemies be your enemies if you really love me.”

  “It’s true I could never be friends with Sidney now,” Brian explained his feelings, “now, that is, I am in the know how he slapped you and insulted and shamed you in public.”

  “I would hope you wouldn’t be friends with such a man,” Roy spoke in almost wailing outrage. “I mean, should you go over to the other side now, I don’t know what would happen . . .”

  “Roy, what are you talking about. I’ve told you again and again you are all I have in the world. You brought me out and showed me what I am, what I feel deep down in me. So of course your enemy is my enemy.” His voice faltered as he pronounced these last words.

  “Sure, Brian, I believe the first part of what you said all right. But would you do something ‘all out’ to prove you love me as much as you say you do? That’s what I mean.”

  “But don’t I prove it, Roy,” he cried, worry and a fearful dread coming into his voice, “when I give you all the love I have? Ain’t that proof enough?”

  “No, there’s deeds, Brian.”

  “That ain’t a deed, my loving you?”

  “I need more proof, Brian. But I can see you only love me for my loving. You just love me in bed.”

  “Not so at all, Roy.” But he said this with very feeble conviction.

  “Would you kill for me if it became necessary, say?”

  “Oh, Roy . . . You think now what you’re saying. Kill for love?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Brian shook his head. He was near tears, and reached for Roy’s hand to contradict what he had just heard, but the older man angrily repulsed him.

  “You don’t love me, Brian.”

  “I do, I do. I love only you . . . But I can’t kill for you. I cain’t.”

  Roy stood up and began pacing up and down the room, his hands in his pocket jingling some loose nails purchased from the carpenter’s shed, his mouth drawn down at the corners. Despite his somewhat unkempt, even filthy appearance, he grew somehow, at least in the eyes of young McFee, more handsome daily, resembling an illustration of the Leatherstocking, a dirty Leatherstocking, it is true, and a more savage one.

  “Roy, you should not even think such a thing, let alone say it. Why, it makes the cold shivers go down my spine.”

  “What crud talk is this?” He turned his full fury on Brian. “Look at this mark by my eye, look at it. He done that. Who? Sidney De Lakes is who. He tormented me all my young life with his contempt, never recognizing me in public, sneering at me in class, when here I done all his homework for him, slaved for him to see he passed the eighth grade and even high school, and all he let me do . . . was occasionally, behind the gym buildings . . . occasionally . . .” Roy’s eyes went glaucous, almost blind; indeed they looked like the eyes of some disinterred statue. “Occasionally he would let me have him, and then spit on me after it was over for my pains . . .”

  Struck by a kind of suffering he had no key to, Brian attempted to embrace his lover, but the renderer pushed him away. The nails fell out of his hands all at once.

  “There he is,” he raged on, “sitting in his house all these years amountin’ to nothin’ on account of he was a football star, too dumb though to go to college unless I went along beside him and did the drudge for him, worthless as the foam on homebrew . . .”

  Roy stooped down and picked up one of the nails he had dropped.

  “But he works at the filling station,” Brian put in, in an effort to deflect the cyclone of wrath moving in the direction now of himself.

  “Call that work, do you, huh? Look at my hands if you want to see work. See them?” He thrust out one hand displaying his sinewy fingers covered with cuts and abrasions, blackened nails and stubby thumb, into the boy’s face.

  “Who would miss him if he was to be killed, Brian?” He took the boy all at once in his arms and kissed his forehead. “Tell me, who?”

  “Now you stop it, do you hear!” Brian shook himself free from the scissors-­grinder. “I won’t hear you talk about murder, Roy. Or I will leave you.”

  Roy lunged at him and held his throat in a vise which made Brian’s eyes roll desperately, his lips go a strange purple.

  “The only way you will leave me is in a pine box. You hear?”

  Without warning he stabbed Brian’s arm with the loose nail he had been toying with. As the nail went into Brian’s flesh, both men exchanged looks as if to question why this was happening, who indeed had commanded it to happen. Then drawing the nail out slowly, wonderingly, Roy allowed Brian to slip to the floor at his feet, where he suddenly struggled for breath, coughing desperately and making retching sounds as he gazed at his arm bleeding from the nail driven into it with such force and passion.

  “You belong solely to me, Brian McFee. Hear me? You are solely mine.”

  “What do you want me to do then, short of cutting my own throat for you?” Brian kept staring at his torn expensive shirt and the blood coming from the nail wound.

  Kneeling down then over Brian, Roy said in mocking whisper: “I want you to act like you’re Sidney’s boy. . . . As a starter, get it?”

  “But he goes for girls.”

  “Does he? Do you know how many times I’ve had him in the woods, the cornfield, back of the gym. You ninny.”

  Slipping off Brian’s shirt now and then kissing the wound made by the nail, Roy put his face close to Brian’s and said: “You both used to hunt together . . . So you go hunting together again, then you can let it happen. I mean let him have you.”

  “And when is this to be, Roy?” He was still weeping from having Roy injure him so cruelly.

  “Just as soon as you get the lead out of your ass. Now. I want it now.”

  “Well, I guess ’tis the hunting season all right.”

  “Yeah, ’tis, since you been filling your belly with the venison and quail I caught for the last four weeks . . .”

  “I guess as usual you are right, Roy.”

  Roy rose over him, and kicked him indifferently, playfully, but hard, and then turned his back on him.

  “I’ll do it for you, Roy . . . I’ll go hunting with him, and all the rest if I can . . . I mean I’ll do my best,” he cried in the face of his friend’s stony silence. “But I won’t kill for you, is that clear?”

  Wheeling about and facing him, Roy started to say something, then, the anger in his eyes changing to a kind of sneering contempt, he took Brian’s mouth in his and kissed him assiduously.

  “Roy, you do love me, don’t you . . . I need your love so bad, you know that. I wish I was enough for you so we didn’t have to think even about Sidney De Lakes.” But at a motion of anger from Roy, Brian finished: “I’ll do what you command, though, never you fear. . . . I wish you wouldn’t of stabbed me though with the nail.” He held the sore place with his finger. “That weren’t needed or right. I can’t stand pain, Roy. It weren’t right.”

  There was no way to do anything else but obey him. Brian had felt for some time that he was slipping away into the tide of the sea until Roy had chosen him for his follower, and before being chosen his hold on life had been so feeble that often he had slept through the entire day. Then Roy had come and taken him, and as a result he had felt if not wholly wanted and loved, at least consumed by a heat so intense that had it been relinquished if only for a moment, the frost and sleep of his old life would have suffocated and chilled him to death.

  Brian on the other hand had a friendly good feeling for Sidney De Lakes and could never hate him, he assured himself. At the same time he was positive that he would never be able to persuade Sidney to have sex with him, for he was certain he was interested only in girls . . . But if Roy pressed him too hard, he supposed he would lie and say Sidney and he had done it together.

  And so just a few hours later after the “scene” with Roy, and the threats and the withheld affection, and the cuffs and blows and nail wound, Brian found himself a
t the Piedmont Filling Station.

  Sid had brightened at the sight of Brian and broke into a full-­wreathed smile.

  “What do you mean, do I like to hunt?” Sidney had answered at once. “Everybody knows I like to. Of course I will go hunting with you . . . And why didn’t you ever ask me before? I was just wondering who to ask to go with me . . . And of course I would like to camp out.”

  The ease with which De Lakes had accepted his proposal so unnerved Brian he went home and didn’t move for twenty-­four hours.

  They were gone (Sidney and Brian) three days and nights. They would have been gone longer but Sidney dared not lose his job at the gas pump.

  Then of course Brian was summoned by his “lord” as soon as he had got back from the hunting trip, but he didn’t need to be summoned. The vassal himself would have come as soon as he had parted with Sid to “report in.”

  “Brian, you better bring good news now,” Sturtevant had said at once and pointed to a newly varnished wooden chair for him to sit down on.

  “I always have the feeling, Roy, that if I was to bring you the sun and the moon on little platters, you would grouse and complain and send them back. I cain’t please you. No way.”

  Brian burst into tears. Roy watched him and picked his nose in his customary obscene manner looking at what he picked before he wiped it on the sole of his shoe. (He knew of course how fastidious little Brian really was despite his trying to ape his own rough ways, and how much he loathed this particular habit of his.)

  “So why don’t you just give me the facts . . . You can skip the details since you are so wrought up,” Roy advised him.

  “Well,” he said, still sobbing, “the first night nothing happened . . .” His eyes moved backward and forward as if trying to recall all that had transpired between them. “I didn’t wear any clothes though as much as possible although the cold was pretty bad. I showed him every way I could that I was an easy mark you see . . .”

  “Which you usually ain’t of course.”

  “I felt something was in the wind though right away even before I stripped for him . . . I felt, well . . .”

  “Yeah,” Roy’s nudging tone betrayed more than eagerness to hear the facts without the details so that Brian stopped and stared ruefully at him.

  “It happened when we went to get the water from the spring. At the risk of pneumonia, I walked down there stark naked. He come along too with his pitcher. I couldn’t believe my good luck. Without sayin’ a word he put his hand on my behind as I was still drawing up my water pitcher. I just turned around when I finished filling it, and said, ‘If you want some, Sid, take it and don’t let’s waste no time. . . .’ ”

  Brian was almost unsure what had happened for a moment as he was telling of his “luck” for Roy was at his throat choking him, but Brian this time had wrested loose and struck the renderer a heavy blow over the Adam’s apple. It nearly killed Roy. He fell, and lay gasping for breath, kicking with his feet. The wind was knocked out of him.

  Then when his breath came back to him and he had got over some of the worst of the pain and the surprise of retaliation on the part of his pupil, Roy spoke penitently: “You’ll have to forgive me, Brian . . . After all I ordered you to do it.”

  “Your damned tootin’ you did,” Brian raised his voice in indignant rage, acting himself like the master now. “I get your drift, too, Sturtevant. I see it all now, you cheap four-flusher. . . . It’s you is in love with this Sidney De Lakes, ain’t it . . . It’s you sendin’ me to be you with him, ain’t it? Come on! . . . Well, you can go and get fucked by him yourself . . . I’m through, do you hear, Roy Sturtevant. Play me for a asshole, will you, and then choke me for doin’ your biddin’. I’m through, you hear. Hate him? Balls. You worship him. He’s your whole life, you filthy son of a bitch sneak.”

  “So what,” Roy turned his full wrath now on his mutinous lover. “I say so what . . . So I worship and love him, and have for years . . . I also want to kill him and be rid of him and I’ll see it done yet with or without your help. Now clear out. Get out. Get! Get out of my life. I don’t want no more of you or your kind . . .”

  But Brian McFee could no more go out of Roy’s life than Roy could let loose or renounce his nagging obsession with Sidney De Lakes.

  Once, just before his Dad’s suicide, the old man had found a huge notebook hidden in Roy’s room, its contents devoted entirely to Sidney De Lakes: snapshots, large photos, even pen-­and-­ink drawings of the football hero from the time he was a small boy on to just prior to Sidney’s arrest and conviction for manslaughter. Had old man Sturtevant lived he would have seen more photos, more pictures, and read more news stories.

  It was Brian also who had found the identical notebook just a few days before the “command” hunting trip. And he had been indeed as chilled in looking through the scrapbook as if he had found out also Roy was guilty of murder.

  “He already in his heart is guilty of it,” Brian had muttered, going through the pages of snapshots and keepsakes hurriedly (Roy had gone down to the privy at the end of his property, for the toilet in the house was stopped up). He had hurried looking as fast as he could, but the scrapbook and his mementoes had a fascination which made him forget time. Then he had felt Roy’s hands tear the book from out of his grasp. But for once Roy did not say anything, or punish him.

  Brian had heard his dismissal but did nothing about it. He sat down on the kind of folding chair popular at camp meetings and funerals. He put his head in his hands for a moment, then making a motion as if he was throwing his hands away, he cried:

  “You cain’t order me out and you know it!”

  “You mean you aim to stay after what has passed between us here today?” Roy spat out. But he still spoke a little huskily and cautiously too owing to the choking Brian had given him, and the surprise he had experienced in finding out that Brian McFee might be a “slave” but he was a scrappy one and dangerous to boot. One could only push him so far, and that limit had been reached today.

  “After all, you belong to me, Brian,” Roy rose and came to stand over him.

  “Do I?” the boy said turning to his tormentor. “Well, then, Roy, here I am.”

  Brian threw himself then into his “master’s” arms, and Roy held him with genuine feeling, kissing what he liked to call his “mahogany” hair and stroking his thick soft eyebrows.

  “You sure have the goods on me, don’t you?” Roy quipped.

  “Now what do you mean by that?” Brian complained, separating himself anxiously from the scissors-­grinder’s embrace.

  “I mean, to choose at random, them keepsakes of mine all about Sidney De Lakes.”

  “Oh, them. Well, don’t everybody keep snapshots and old souvenirs like that?”

  “Maybe of their families they do, but nobody ever kept so many souvenirs as you call them of one man until I come along. No, not in all of history was one man so toasted and remembered and honored by the one who is so despised by him. . . . That is why I aim to kill him.”

  “But don’t, Roy. Don’t. Let him live. Let’s us clear out instead.”

  “Us clear out for that little no-­account gas-­pump attendant? What kind of a friend are you turning out to be, Brian McFee?”

  “Oh drop it then. No use talkin’ to you anyhow. . . . But why ain’t I enough for you?” His voice soared and his brownish-­golden eyes looked like prize marbles. “Why don’t my love mean more to you, huh? Why don’t you give up this De Lakes man? What’s wrong with you?”

  “How in hell would I know what’s wrong with me at this late date! After all I was never brought up decent like you with your rich Grandpa and these uncles in Key West and all. . . . But I know what I feel, and I know I want to kill him for what I feel and what he has done to me.”

  As he spoke these last words his own voice soared high in the register, matching the swooning crescendo of Brian’s just moments before, so that the two voices, one coming after the other, resembled singers in some seldo
m-­played oratorio.

  “Maybe, Roy, I could go and explain your feelings to him,” Brian spoke cautiously. “Maybe even he would apologize for what he done to you on Graduation Night.”

  “It’s too late for any of that I told you!” Roy turned away from him, hiding his eyes brimming with tears. “You just work on gettin’ him in deep with you, hear? That’s all I ask of you. It ain’t much either.”

  “Roy, what do you mean now by that! . . . I don’t want to get in deep with him. What would I get deep in with him about anyhow . . . We don’t have nothin’ really in common. Just lettin’ him have me at the spring and later, that won’t never lead to bein’ deep with him . . .”

  “But you are in deep with me, Brian.”

  “Yeah, I guess you can say that again all right.” He shook his head.

  “Well, then wind him around your little finger . . . That’s all you got to do. Make him dependent on you.”

  “I just doubt he cares very much about me. He just likes to poke me. That’s about the extent of it . . . He likes my buns, he told me.” Brian turned beet-­red on saying this.

  “And you say he ain’t in deep with you, you shifty-­eyed little bugger . . . You know better! Once he gets in deep with you like that, we’ve got him. . . .”

  “Oh, Roy, why do we have to get into trouble . . . It scares me so.”

  Roy took Brian’s head in his hands and held his mouth to him. He kissed him solemnly a little like religious people sometimes kiss a favorite plaster saint in church.

  “Make him pay for what he’s made me suffer, sweetheart. Be me for him like you said a while ago which made me so mad cause it was the truth. Be me for him, hear? Make him care for you, make him want you till he busts, then hurt him. Make him smart for what he done to me, kid.”

  Brian dissolved now under Roy’s kisses and embraces. Roy was like a virtuoso violinist that night as a lover, and Brian was the right and only violin, made by care and by hand only for him, and to be played upon with such consummate skill only for this one night, for as Roy kissed him again and again on every part of his yielding body, he knew he would throw him away instantly for the sake of his hatred for Sidney. Roy loved Brian deliriously but he hated Sidney De Lakes more. As he had said, he did not know why he hated so much, but he knew he was controlled body and soul by this hatred, and by his thirst for making his foe pay. And Brian was the one who would find out how to exact payment.