“Naw, that’s all right.” Then Eric said, “Mike don’t want me even goin’ into your apartment.” He remained up on the concrete. Suddenly, he said, “He’s asleep now. So he wouldn’t know.” He wondered if the gorilla mask was worth examining. It had covered Bill’s whole head. Was there fur on it? He’d seen it only seconds.
“It sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself. But I have a better idea. I know Mike likes that sorta stuff, too. I’ll lend you the DVD, and you can take it and watch it later with your dad. I’m going to bring up my little table and set it out. Then I’m going to bring up a chair — I only have one. But you go around and take one of Mr. Condotti’s. He won’t mind as long as we put it back when we’re finished. Then I’m going to bring out two cups of hot chocolate. We can sit right here and enjoy a morning of each other’s company — and Mike doesn’t have to get his knickers in a twist. Want me to bring up the monkey mask?”
“Why? It’s just a King Kong head.”
“Oh, you kids are so cool today — you’re gonna cool yourself out of everything interesting. How many people live two floors up from somebody who can say the magic word and change into a donkey, a phoenix, an ape, or a cockatrice? Hey, I like you guys — you and Mike. You’re good neighbors. Go get that chair, now.” Bill turned back through his sunken doorway.
Eric started toward the lawn table. And got in another finger-full. Lifting away one of Mr. Condotti’s green enameled lawn chairs, he carried it back.
Bill was already at the head of the steps, positioning the three-legged table with its pebbled glass top in front of his own wire-backed seat.
As Bill moved it, the table’s legs complained on the brick.
Speaking more softly, Eric said, “My dad don’t want me to go inside your place ’cause you’re gay.” He put his own chair, clanking, down.
Bill let go the table, looking at it. “Now how in the world — ” raising a hand to his jaw, with its two days, possibly three, of auburn stubble, he rubbed slowly — “did I figure that one out for myself? Hold on a second. I’ll be back.” He turned to hurry down his steps.
A minute later, he was up again with two black mugs. One had a white skull and bones on it, the other a red noose. He set them on the glass. Like heavily creamed coffee, slightly tanner but with a purplish cast, cocoa turned within the rims. “Sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, now.” Sunlight on Bill’s face made the unshaven hairs glitter. He pulled back his chair and dropped onto it, knees wide.
More slowly, Eric stepped around his and lowered himself, leaning his forearms on his jeans’ thighs. He meshed his fingers.
A jay creaked among the sparrows that had replaced dawn’s crows. “And while in no way am I suggesting that you bring the topic up with Mike, should your dad mention it again, you can tell him from me — if it occurs to you — I do not shit where I eat!”
Eric looked puzzled, unsure what Bill meant.
Bottom went on: “I live here, Eric. I would no more think of putting a hand on you than I would cut off one of my nuts with a spoon. A dull spoon. I am not a stupid man. And doing something like that would be unbelievably stupid — given how much of it’s running around loose in Atlanta.” Lifting the mug with the noose, he raised it toward Eric. “Cheers.”
Eric said, “I bet Bottom’s gotta be a rough name to have if you’re gay. People are probably always making jokes about you and stuff.”
Bill glanced at the clouds. “Tell me! But that’s what you get if you’re beloved of the fairies, the bottom of the dream of God, the great spool from which all tales are woven.” Again he looked at Eric. “That’s what a ‘bottom’ was, in Elizabethan English, by the way: a big spool at the bottom of a loom from which they took the thread for the brocades they were weaving.” Over his mug, he blinked pale eyes. “The thing about the jokes is, everyone who makes one always thinks he’s the first person to think it up — that’s the part I never understood.” A drop of chocolate rolled to the mug’s lower rim, hung there, and shook. Across scuffed black, one of Bill’s zipper pockets showed a red sliver. “You learn to ignore it.” Between the jacket’s zipper teeth, pumpkin colored hairs curved over his chest’s freckles.
For a moment Eric held his breath. Then he blurted: “If I went inside with you, Mike wouldn’t know — ’cause he’s asleep. It’s my last mornin’ in Atlanta. Soon as he gets up, we’re gonna drive down to Diamond Harbor. My mom says she’s got a new waitress job, and I’m gonna stay with her for the next six months, maybe a year. If we go in now, I’ll suck your dick. You can fuck my ass — I got a third of a tube of KY up my butt already. You let me eat your ass out while you suck me off, and I’ll shoot you a load that’ll gag you. I don’t got the biggest fuckin’ dick in the world. But — ” one of the things Eric had learned under the highway — “it ain’t the smallest you ever seen, either — ”
Bill came forward the same time his mug clacked the glass. “Wooooah, fella!” Sitting back, he frowned. “I thought your dad told me you were on your high school football team or something…?”
“Last term I played guard.” In the white enameled seat, Eric sat back, too. “I’m the team cocksucker. Me and Scott. We do about a third of the guys. The rest don’t even wanna know about no shit like that.”
“You’re a big, strong, very good looking boy, Eric. And butch as a beer keg. I admit it. I’m…surprised.”
“Yeah. Everybody pretends it don’t happen — at least with me.”
“With that Young Superman physique of yours you’ve had for the past year or so, people are probably afraid you’ll beat them up.”
“I don’t like fightin’.”
“Well, probably they don’t know that. I doubt it’s that much different from the way it was back at my high school.”
“I told my mom I was gay when I was twelve — when we was up in Hugantown — with her mom. She’d left the TV goin’, on one of those HBO shows. The gay ones was all she watched. I jerked off three times that night, and the next day I told her. That’s when her and Mike had broke up again. She said that was cool — me bein’ gay, and how she would always love me whoever I wanted to go to bed with. But I should wait to tell Mike. So I did. I ain’t told him nothin’, yet.”
“Dads being dads, probably she knew what she was talking about.”
“I hope she remembers I told her — ”
“When your kid says he’s gay, Eric, that’s not something you forget.”
“I don’t even like gay guys.”
“Hey, now — you’re gay…” Bill’s puzzlement was disapproving. “How can you not like gay men — unless you don’t like yourself? Let me add, I always thought you were likable.”
“Sometimes — ” Eric looked down at the vertical lines of sunlight on the nearer mug — “I don’t think I’m really gay.”
“Oh, come on. You just said you suck off half the football team — ”
“A couple of the other line guys fuck me. I fuck Philly-Bob back. I hope he ain’t got AIDS, ’cause he won’t use no condom. He says that’s for faggots — I don’t know what he thinks he is. But I don’t argue with him. Besides, I don’t love those things, either — ”