Jack Pine stood nervously walking and skipping and kicking at stones about a hundred feet down the road. He too was skinny at sixteen, his brown hair less controlled than Buddy’s. They were similar in looks and build, enough so that people sometimes thought they might be cousins, but they were merely best friends. Their differences were not in their features, but what they did with them: Buddy’s expressions were confident, amused, aware, while Jack’s face mostly mirrored doubt and insecurity. Between the two, Buddy seemed the older, the more mature. He came strolling down the dirt road, smiling, hands in trouser pockets, and softly called, “Dad? You there?”
“Buddy? Here I am!” Jack’s voice, anxious, was too loud, the words too jumbled together.
Buddy found him in the dark, and squeezed his arm. “Take it easy, Dad.”
“I’m fine!” Jack told him, smiling maniacally though they could barely see each other. “Is Wendy—?”
“All softened up for you, Dad.”
Jack swallowed. “I just... I just go over there?”
“She’s waiting, Dad. You know what I mean? Waiting.”
“But — I don’t know how to...” Jack’s hands fluttered in the night like moths. “How to act. I don’t know how to act.”
“Act like me, Dad,” Buddy told him, grinning as he presented the gift. “Just go over there and be me.”
Jack’s eyes widened. He looked at his friend as though for the first time. “I could,” he whispered, awed by it.
“Sure, you could, Dad. Go on, get over there before she cools off.”
Buddy gave him a little push, and Jack stepped toward the unseen Buick, tripping but recovering, moving on. In the dark, his movements were like Buddy’s, gliding, insinuating, certain. Then he stopped and looked back. Above, clouds shifted, and the sheen of perspiration on Jack’s face suddenly gleamed pale in moonlight. His smile was one he’d never owned before. “Buddy?” he called, transfixed, spotlit by the moon. “Thanks!” And he turned away, sliding Buddy-like through the dark.
I smile at the sky, remembering that incredible moment, that instant when I opened the Buick’s door and the light went on — like a movie starting, like a curtain going up on a play — and there she was, like nothing I’d ever seen before. And she held her arms out to me....
I held my arms out, up, to the sky, the way I did when I played the Aztec prince. Red. There’s blood on my hand, my right hand. Dried, dark, dull. I put my hand to my mouth, I lick the blood away. All gone. No evidence left. No matter. I forget all about it. “That was something,” I say, living nothing but that first moment so long ago. “It was so exciting. My very first time. I just lost... I just lost all control. It was like an explosion. That’s when I really and truly came to life.”
From the corner of my eye, I see the interviewer make a note. A sexual suggestion, but just a hint, will get into his copy, past his editor. It’s all good for my image. Then he looks at me and says, “Buddy Pal was there even back then, was he?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Buddy Pal’s not only my best friend in all the world, he’s my oldest friend in all the world. We met in nursery school, man. We ate sand together. And on to college.”
Flashback 2
In the college auditorium, in the evening, a production of Hamlet was being rehearsed. The director was a member of the school faculty, but all the actors were students. Act V, scene i, was being run through, in costume, but without scenery or sets.
The two gravediggers shuffled onto the bare stage, dressed in rags, shovels over their shoulders. The first gravedigger was a large and bulky boy of nineteen, moving like a football player at the end of a hard game, his manner awkward but willing. The second gravedigger, stepping slyly, hunch-shouldered, bowlegged, completely comfortable, was Jack.
The football player spoke first, in a flat monotone, like the telephone company announcing the time: “Is she to be buried in Christian burial that willfully seeks her own salvation?” He gazed out over the dark auditorium as he declaimed, over the heads of the other actors and their friends and the jaundiced-looking director. He seemed unaware of the other person on stage, to whom he was allegedly speaking.
Jack shuffled around him, quick but obscurely infirm. His voice was a triumphant cackle as he said, “I tell thee she is; and therefore make her grave straight.” He winked and leered at his partner, sharing the joke with him, though the partner gave him nothing back. With mock solemnity, Jack crossed himself and sardonically intoned, “The crowner hath sate on her, and finds it Christian burial.” An echo of brogue lilted his speech.
“How can that be,” the football player said, one word thudding after another, “unless she drown’d herself in her own defense?”
Jack capered slightly, an arthritic imitation of a jester. “Why, ’tis found so,” he said, and winked.
The football player massively shook his head; acting. “It must be say often-dough,” he announced. “It cannot be else. For here—”
“Wait a minute!” called the director, rising from his front-row seat, hurrying up onto the stage. A balding, potbellied man of fifty, he was famous in the school for long brooding silences followed by excessive explosions followed by tortured apologies. While everyone else in the seats watched with half smiles of anticipation, this man crossed the stage to Jack and the football player, crying out, “What is this ‘often-dough’?”
“I dunno,” the football player said, blinking and looking defensive. “That’s what it says in the book.”
“It is not,” the director assured him, and waved a paperback copy under the football player’s nose. “The phrase is ‘se offendendo.’ Do you suppose you can say that?”
While the football player made a stumbling attempt to repeat the phrase, Jack looked toward the wings and saw Buddy there, just out of sight behind the side curtain, gesturing to Jack to come over. As the director attempted to teach se offendendo to the football player, with increasingly caustic asides, Jack crossed to the wings, walking with his usual quick buoyance, the shovel now jauntily borne on his shoulder. “Hi, Buddy,” he said when he had cleared the stage.
Buddy spoke quietly, conspiratorially. “Listen, Dad,” he said, “you stuck here?”
Jack smiled, like sunlight breaking through clouds. The hand not holding the shovel moved in an expansive delighted gesture. “I love it, Buddy! I’m alive here!”
Buddy nodded, without interest. “Oh, yeah?”
“Acting!” Jack beamed at the stage, where director and football player moved even further from understanding. “This is it for me,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I got a date with that Linda from seventeenth-century lit.”
Happy for his friend, Jack said, “Yeah? Great. She’s okay!”
“Only I need a couple bucks, Dad,” Buddy said. “Five?”
“Oh, sure, Buddy!”
Putting down the shovel, Jack searched his rags for his wallet, found it, and handed Buddy a bill. Buddy took it without comment, stowed it away in a pocket, and said, “Maybe she’s got a pal for you, if you ever get outa here.” Grinning, teasing with a little conspiratorial wink, he added, “And if you behave yourself.”