“No,” Ann said. “Who?”
“Jay MacAmon.”
“Oh…!” Ann said, brightly. “Really? You know, he’s a very important figure in our study.”
“I know he is,” Eric said. “You already told me that. But, see, when they made this place all modern and turned it into a library, they took that old wall out and put a new one in and tore out the molding with the dent, and put in new floorboards. So there’s no way to see it no more; nobody can ask now, ‘Hey, what’s that mean? What must have happened, I mean, right there?’”
Ann was looking around at the ceiling, not at the floor.
“And I guess if you knew about them things, it’s a little hard to see ’em go.”
“With all the stories and documents and papers about MacAmon, there’s almost nothing official about Jalisco, except that they lived here with Mr. Kyle.”
“And before that, so did Mr. Haskell.” Eric shrugged. “Havin’ an alternate way of talkin’ can be a pretty good thing — teaches you a lot.” Eric thought: I’m fallin’ in love with my own voice, tryin’ to sound like a wise old man. Lemme shut up, or I’m gonna really start soundin’ like an old fool.
Ann said, “I’m not even sure where Carlos Jalisco was from.”
For a moment he wasn’t sure who she was talking about. “Um…Mexico, I guess. But you probably mean what little town he come from.”
“Have you any idea what happened to him — I mean, why exactly he couldn’t speak?” Ann asked. “Was it some childhood disease?”
“The story I got from both of ’em was that some pretty nasty people had done some pretty awful stuff to him, back when he was a kid, south of the border — but he got away from ’em and run north.”
They wandered slowly through the web of offices that, really, had obliterated and absorbed the mansion.
Ann said, “I wonder what they didn’t want him to tell.”
“Now, that’s funny,” Eric said. “I never thought of that.”
“Shit and me was talkin’ about it. Shit remembered more than I did, but then, he’s lived here longer. He said there was a group of non-hearing gay men and women who used to get together in Hemmings — I told you Pinewood, but he said it was Hemmings — for about three years — on the last Thursday of the month. They met and talked with each other in ALS, and kept minutes and attendance records. They had meals together and went to movies with each other. Mex was part of that group for almost four years — ”
“They have the minutes upstairs. I was reading them over last week. Most of the time they met at the house of a man named Bob Bancock, who kept the minutes. He left them to the Hemmings Library. Jay used to bring Mex over from Gilead Island, then drive him to Hemmings, and stay for the meetings. He’d practice his own ASL with Mex and the others. Bancock was very impressed with him — he made a couple paragraph long notes about how committed Jay seemed to be about him — Mex. Bancock didn’t have a partner himself, and I think — oh, just from some of the things I read — that he would have liked a similar relationship. Bancock moved to Ohio in the middle of oh-three, and — like I told you — gave the minutes to the Hemmings Library, who were going to throw them out a few years ago, but they ended up here. I mean, that is a lot, learning a new language, bringing your friend to meetings, month after month. I understand what MacAmon did for Jalisco. I’m just wondering what Mex did for him.”
…drank his piss, ate his shit, sucked his toes, fucked with any of his friends and puppies that Jay wanted him to, taught ’em to make chili, truck stop-, orgy-, and everyday-manners. Even though her study was about sexuality, maybe it would be a little crude to go into all of that, right here, right now. “I’m pretty sure they did a lot for each other,” Eric said. “You can count on that. But I never knew nothin’ about the deaf-folks club — that’s all from Shit. Oh-three was before my time in Diamond Harbor. I didn’t come till oh-seven.”
Two weeks later, just before they came for their penultimate session together, outside Ann’s door, Shit asked Eric, “We gonna have us a good argument, where we yell and cuss each other down to the devil, so we can go home and lie around and hug a lot?”
Eric chuckled. “Probably.”
“Then let’s make it a good one.” And grinning, Shit rapped on Ann’s front door under the hanging wisteria. But Ann — who was not there to see that part — seriously wondered whether these heated exchanges weren’t damaging their relationship.
[110] WET SAND SWIRLED his wrists, washed under his knee, over his heels. He crawled through black sandy water slashed with light — the twentieth time, the thirtieth? Stone brushed his shoulders. He moved after the flickers before him, trying to breathe. Was Shit still ahead of him…?
Was he in some basement?
A light glimmered before Eric, and — the church cellar in Hemmings; somehow they’d gotten caught down there? — he reeled upright to stagger forward —
Sand gave under Eric’s work shoes. Piled left and right, plastic sacks rose fifteen-feet here, forty-feet there. On the topmost tier of benches, half a dozen moppets, most naked, girls and boys, age nine or ten, sat with Ann. Their faces were serious, interested; many were black or Asian. Many had their hair brushed up in a small pyramid on top of their heads.
In front of the benches was a tall post. Someone had nanobolted a board to it bearing the motto:
THE GIFT MUST MOVE…
…which meant they must be in the Gilead Elementary School. Had they somehow gotten up to the first floor?
And why was the floor covered with sand…?
It didn’t look like the school. It looked like a canyon among the garbage sacks making up the Bottom.
Still, the youngsters carried themselves like students.
Eric dragged in a breath: it was cool and easy to breathe — thank all the generous universe.
Shit came around the corner, wearing only a vest and work shoes — but otherwise naked. He herded some dozen more children ahead.
“Everything okay?” Eric asked. “You guys talk to Dynamite?”
Shit grinned — he wasn’t wearing his upper plate. “You know, he loves them kids. They asked him all sorts of questions. They were all over him — he was great!”
From the upper benches, in her silver filigree pants, Ann Lee smiled down. Some of the students were climbing up to sit near her.
Eric felt uncomfortable. He wished he had gone with them to talk with the senior garbage man — who did love kids, but (especially if they were “all over him”) so easily could have caressed one or the other in an inappropriate manner. For most of them, it wouldn’t have meant anything. Still, kids had parents; and with parents, you never knew —
Shit looked about twenty-five — which meant Eric was twenty-two or twenty-three. He smiled around at them.
Above the walls, the sky glimmered opal, its pearl misted with violets, chartreuses, cerises.
Ann said, “Do you want to ask Mr. Haskell and Mr. Jeffers some of the questions you prepared? You’ve had a chance, now, to talk to Mr. Dynamite — Mr. Haskell’s father. But he has to get back to work.”
Three hands shot up — from two girls on the lower benches and one boy up near Ann. (For a moment Eric felt relief; that meant they’d be joining him soon — only that didn’t feel entirely right…)