excerpt from
Carter

In the moments after that, we stared so long at each other that I wasn’t sure whether his eyes were mine or mine his.

“The mountain culture,” he then said, leaning back as if beginning something long to say—but then he stopped. He looked straight ahead, his face broken with the smile of someone watching TV and amused by it. He might have sat there for a long while if he hadn’t had a cigarette burning between his fingers to snap him out of it. “Tell me about Deedee,” he then said that quickly.

I was reluctant at first, and shrugged to show my reluctance, so he mentioned, as if for the sake of talking about girls to a boy like me, that he often saw two girls walking on the road by the store.

I laughed out loud. He was thinking of Pam and Sally. “They’re mountain girls,” I said, not aware that I was showing disgust.

“Oh, mountain girls,” he said. “Pretty, though.”

Pretty? He sure had a strange sense of what a pretty girl looked like. For that matter, most of him was strange. As I thought about it, he seemed to view the mountain from high above, from so high above that he couldn’t see much up close. He was like the roof of this A-frame, the way it came down sharply, spreading out.

He said he often saw my father delivering mail in Hard Hollow.

I said nothing to this. Instead, I asked him whether he knew Rusty Clackford. To ask him this question was my way of amusing myself with his familiarity to the mountain. He didn’t know Rusty by name, but when I described him as the very old man who teetered up and down the same road that Sally and Pam walked, he thought he might have seen him once or twice. He had a faint smile, as if curious of my little diversion.

With my nerve up, I asked him if he was from Cape Cod.

“No,” he said right away. He enjoyed stopping me this way, seeing me struggle to say something else. There was a game going on between us, a game of moves. He asked a question. One move. Then I asked another question. Another move. The object of the game, it seemed, was to know the most private things.

He sat for the longest time just looking at me, and I glanced back, each time seeing him still looking at me. We had this manner between us, this manner and method of glancing and staring.

“I’ve been alone most of my life,” he said, out of the blue.

What struck me about this remark was that there seemed to be no strategy to his telling me this, and, naturally, I wondered what his life had been like.

“I’ve been selfish,” he went on, almost as if I had asked him to. “I’ve had many lovers. Men, women—most haven’t been worth it.”

I laughed inside at his remark that his lovers hadn’t been worth it. Then I felt an excitement at hearing him say “men.” It was an excitement like that of being somewhere for the first time. Still, I didn’t believe him. I especially didn’t believe that another man would do it with him. He could no more do it than dribble a basketball. He was old, with spindly legs and a big gut and a large, ugly head. He was making it all up.

“Peter was my lover in New Orleans,” he said, as if he had one in every city in America.

Listening to him was like seeing Playboy for the first time. Until you see it, you don’t really believe that such a magazine exists. In the same way, you grow up hearing that men could be gay, grow up calling your classmates fags and queers and other such names, but until you see one or hear one talk about it, you don’t really believe it.

“He loved doing it anywhere, anywhere at all,” he went on. “He’d swing from a chandelier.”

I felt my mouth about to pop open in laughter. There were other fags in Harpers Ferry, and we teased them, but never got within a mile. We had to yell names at them from the hill. But this was an old man who was gay, and it had never occurred to me that an old man could be gay or, for that matter, that a gay man could be old. But here he was, old like my grandfather, though he didn’t sound like my grandfather at all. All Granddaddy Roy ever talked about was how the railroad was disappearing, how the Orioles were having another bad season, and how much effort it took to grow pumpkins every year.

“You ever want to make it with a man?” he asked.

The question came fast, out of nowhere, but what surprised me was that I didn’t feel uncomfortable with it. Actually, I was amused, amused by his angle. I knew what he was and what he was doing. He was an old pervert, and he was after me, but he was foolish for thinking I didn't see through his scheme. My reaction was, he could ask or say whatever he liked. All of this was better than hacking weeds for my father.

I actually felt smug as I sat there thinking about how shocked my parents would be to know what I was hearing. I wondered whether a queer old man had ever said this to my father. The whole time I had that feeling—that feeling of my life being shaken up. I had felt it when I met Deedee, then again when I met Lonny Dunn, the worst roughneck on the mountain, and now this old man.

The longer we sat, the trickier he became. He began comparing us, saying we were the same type of man, sensitive and emotional. Again and again he steered the conversation toward sex. Boys shouldn’t have hangups about homosexuality, he said, although he said he hated that word, homosexuality. Sounded clinical, he said.

If you put two men together in bed, in the dark, neither, he said, would know the difference. Skin was skin. He made homosexuality sound like a puzzle that could neither be solved nor put down.

Then, that quickly, I could feel it coming—it made me sit slightly out of my body, over the chair and room.

“Come over here,” he said with a smile that anyone could see was slimy and sinister.

I wondered if I would die, be buried under the house like all those kids John Wayne Gasey had killed. I could still run. But I wouldn’t. I knew that. I was not the type to run, no matter what he did. He seemed to know that.

As I moved over to the sofa with him, I felt myself sinking into utter submission that was not easy to hide. I could still get away, I told myself. Then, in one great effort with my voice, I asked the only question that came to mind. “Are A-frames hard to heat?”

“Dreadful,” he said, believing it was really a question. “Like a fuckin’ church.”
I smiled. I liked hearing an adult talk vulgar.

He reached over and started petting my head, and I almost laughed out loud. It seemed I was his dog Willie. I felt his hand run off the sides of my head. I didn’t look up at him. He kept saying I was smart and nice-looking. Smart and nice-looking, he said. His breath stunk of tobacco.

Sitting there, I got the feeling, the sick, mixed feeling, that I wasn’t as repulsed as I should be.

“See, that’s not so bad,” he said.

It wasn’t, but still it was ridiculous, being petted by an old man like a dog.
He ask me if Deedee ever let me kiss her. I knew he was enjoying this brief trip outside his own experience and into the world of young people. “She let you fuck her?”

I like hearing him say fuck. I shook my head.

“Just as well,” he said, stopping just long enough to light another cigarette with a little green lighter.

I wondered if all fags used little green lighters. For that matter, I wondered if only fags lived in A-frames.

He put the cigarette down, on the edge of the glass table, scooted closer, and slowly he pulled me close to his chest. A hundred thoughts were shooting in different directions. Was I gay? If not, what was wrong with me? What would Deedee think? It took all my strength not to tighten up, to hold my muscles still, as I did not want to show fear. I felt the itchy wool of his sweater and smelled the smoke of his cigarettes. At first, I counted the seconds, waiting for it to be over. Then, before I knew it, I was nearly relaxed.

“There,” he said, sitting away from me, “that wasn’t too bad, was it?”
I didn’t answer.

“Natural enough,” he said.

I was unsure of how I felt. The world was blinking and new. To say I was stunned would not be true. To say I enjoyed it wouldn’t be, either. It was somewhere in the middle, where I didn’t expect it and where I couldn’t understand it.

It was late by this time, and he said I should go. He asked when I would be back, and I said tomorrow, although I wasn’t so sure. As I walked back through the woods, I felt confused but excited.

John Michael Cummings
excerpt from
Carter

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