Читать книгу Kenny's Back - Victor J. Banis - Страница 4

Strange, we had waited in tense excitement, not only that day, but I think through the whole time he was gone, for Kenny to come back. Olsen and Ingrid had cleaned that house until every inch of it glistened, and Olsen had practically worked herself into a lather cooking and baking every single dish she could think of that Kenny had ever liked. It was like a son returning from the wars, a prodigal son, and that night should have been a time of celebration and high spirits. But all we had done was gather the wood and the kindling, and we had heaped it plenty high enough, all right, but the match that was needed to set it blazing was missing.

I was the first to see Olsen come into the kitchen, and I knew from her pale face and hot red eyes that the meeting we were all waiting for wasn’t going to take place—not this night, at least. Kenny’s back was to her and when she put her hand lightly on his shoulder, he jumped high enough that he all but scraped the ceiling. I had never seen or imagined Kenny that tense.

“Tomorrow,” Olsen answered the question in his dark eyes. “She’ll see you tomorrow. She’s as weak as a kitten tonight.”

I looked away when she said it. I didn’t want to see the reaction in his face. But at least she hadn’t sent him away, and she hadn’t outright refused to see him. Olsen would never have lied about that, not even though she loved Kenny as much as she did. So now we’d have to wait some more, for another day, at least.

All of us showed the strain of that waiting as the evening passed. I thought about all the things I could do to make it easier, if not for me, then at least for Kenny. I almost suggested showing him the barn, and some of the work we had done around the place since he had been gone. I thought of taking him into town for a beer or something. We had done that sometimes, even though back then Kenny hadn’t been dry behind the ears. I thought of a dozen things we used to do on nights like this, when Kenny wasn’t up to some mischief or wanted someone to share his mischief with him.

There was a wall five years thick between us, though, and I sat quietly and waited for Kenny to come over it, or open a gate in it; but if there was such a gate, Kenny didn’t find it, or else he passed it by without notice. The closest we came to conversation was when he remarked to me, “It sure is hot for October, isn’t it?” and I said, “Spring came late.”

It was Ingrid who kept things moving along. I don’t know whether she alone escaped the strain of the evening or whether maybe she felt it worst of all, but she talked almost without stopping for a breath. Olsen had always said that what Ingrid lacked in things to say she made up for in words to say it with, but at least she filled up some of the empty spaces of that night with her words, and I think we were all glad for that.

Kenny talked too, and kidded around with her, but his heart wasn’t in it any more than it was in the spread that Olsen set before us. I had seen Kenny many a time put away a whole apple pie without making a dent in his appetite, but this time he picked at the one piece like it was made of sawdust. At nine o’clock, at least two hours earlier than I had ever known him to think of bed—at least, for sleeping—he yawned.

“It’s been a long day,” he said in a voice that came as close as he had ever let it come to apologizing.

“I’ll show you your room,” Ingrid said, jumping up from her chair.

He fixed a peculiar look on her, one that I couldn’t make out. “I haven’t forgotten it,” he said simply. He stood up then and started from the room alone.

“See you all in the morning,” he said, and he was gone.

I smiled to myself at that. How had the little devil known that the old room was still his? It was the nicest bedroom in the house and it might well have been taken over by one of us in the years that he had been gone, instead of being kept like a shrine for him. But he had known—and as usual, he had been right.

“He hasn’t changed a bit,” Ingrid said, looking after him with a wistful expression.

Olsen snorted in the funny way she had and busied herself clearing the rest of the table. “As though you had sense enough to notice,” she commented, but in such a way that said she didn’t mean it.

“Funny, I’d forgotten how handsome he was,” Ingrid said. She chewed at the knuckle of one hand, a habit we both shared, and stared thoughtfully at the door through which he had gone. She remembered me finally and turned her blue eyes on me almost accusingly.

“Mar, aren’t you happy to see him back?” she asked. “You’ve been as quiet as a parson in a brothel.”

“Ingrid.” Olsen banged a bowl into the sink disapprovingly.

“Well, he has,” she insisted.

“It’s his home, isn’t it?” I replied, standing up and avoiding Ingrid’s eyes. “This I where he ought to be. Some day he’ll own all this, if…” I shrugged and didn’t finish it. We all knew that whether he would ever own it or not depended upon that meeting with his mother. It was no secret that for more than a year now Mrs. Baker had intended changing her will, when she was strong enough to deal with the lawyers. If she went ahead with those plans, it would be the church, and not Kenny, who would own the place someday.

“And if he does, what’ll happen to us? What’ll happen to you, Mar?” Ingrid asked in a cooler voice. “You might not be running things then, Mar. At best you’d be just another hired hand.”

That stopped me. Even Olsen, at the sink, turned around with a shocked expression. I suppose both of us still thought of Ingrid as young and sweet, forgetting that she could also be spiteful and mean.

The worst of it was, though, that she was right, even if I had never thought of that before. If Kenny stayed and patched things up with his mother, he would end up running the farm in place of me—and I would be just another hired hand, or maybe out of a job altogether.

“Is that why you were so cold toward him?” Ingrid asked cuttingly.

“Ingrid, may the good Lord forgive you for talking this way,” Olsen said. She put a hand to her breast. It had always been hard for her to see that people had their selfish sides too, and it was a part of life she had never been able to cope with.

“No,” I said, holding my own temper in check, but with some effort. “No, that’s not why.”

It wasn’t until I had gone out, banging the back door behind me that I realized she had goaded me after all into admitting that I had been cold toward him. I even wondered if maybe she didn’t know why. For all her giddiness and apparent helplessness, I knew full well Ingrid was as sharp as she was pretty. Even if she had been stone stupid, she’d have known about the other, about what had happened before Kenny left. I doubt if there was anyone in Hanover who didn’t know about Dexter Holloman. If Ingrid still had a crush on Kenny, it wasn’t because she didn’t know about that—and there was no telling how much more she might know.

I thought about Dexter Holloman while I finished up my chores, and the thought of him made me shiver even though it was a warm night.

They, the others in the house, were waiting with anxious breath for the meeting that was going to take place tomorrow in the pink house. Right now, that was as far as any of us had thought about things.

But Dexter was there, hanging back in the dark part of all our thoughts. Sooner or later, planned or accidental, there was sure to be another meeting too—and in the long run, that one might be more important than the one between Kenny and his mother.

The house was quiet when I came back in. Ingrid must have gone to her room. Olsen was in the front room, mending. I looked in on her after I had locked up.

“Good night,” I said from the doorway. “Don’t strain your eyes with that.”

She smiled faintly. “That’s like saying don’t squeeze the apples after they’re already sauce.” She looked up over her glasses. “She didn’t mean what she said, Mar.”

“I know she didn’t,” I lied.

She sighed and folded her hands thoughtfully over her sewing. “Lord willing, someday I’ll see her married to some nice young man. That’s what she needs. I always thought how nice it would be if she and Kenny…but there, now I’m talking like a wishful old woman.”

“Don’t stay up all night wishing.” I grinned at her and left, climbing the stairs toward my room. It was always easy to forget that mothers were human, and there was Olsen being just a little small too, but in a nice way. And she was right: it would be nice for Ingrid if she and Kenny were to hit it off that way. Probably it would even be a good thing for Kenny, in the long run.

Well, when it came to that, I was being the smallest of all, wasn’t I? It was Ingrid who was most responsible for Kenny’s coming back, and who had done the most to try to patch things up between him and his mother. And Olsen wasn’t the first mother to wish her daughter could marry the boss’s son. But what excuse did I have for being jealous. Love wasn’t prerogative.

I cleaned up and went to my own room, where I undressed in the dark and threw myself across the top of the bedclothes. I yawned a few times and tried to convince myself that I was dog-tired and would fall right asleep.

I didn’t, of course. I lay in the dark and stared up at the ceiling where the shadows of the big pear tree’s branches chased one another back and forth with each breeze.

He was here, in the house, in the next room. If I called out, he’d probably hear me. Maybe he would even come slipping along the hall as he sometimes used to, and we’d smoke a cigarette in the dark and talk seriously about things that only seem important at times like that. Maybe….

The hall floor creaked, but it was only Olsen, coming to bed. It wasn’t until she had gone by and the door to her room had opened and closed that I realized how tight my breath was in my chest. I sat up, shaking a little, and lit a cigarette.

He won’t be coming down that hall, I told myself firmly, almost enjoying the flash of pain it caused me. That was too many years and too many pains ago, and probably he had forgotten all about that, just as he had forgotten that I was Mar, and not Ingemar. He had outgrown what I had never quite learned to live with, and it was time now for me to stop kidding myself about it and pretending it had been different.

Kenny had changed. Well, what of it? That wasn’t so unusual. I’d changed too, in a lot of ways. Olsen had grown absentminded and I was willing to bet her hair was a lot grayer than it looked to me. Ingrid had grown up and become what everyone said was a beautiful woman, even though I still saw her as a skinny little girl.

The only thing that hadn’t changed was the past. All of those times that I kept remembering, they were just the way they had always been, even to our very first day in the pink house. I was seventeen then, and Kenny thirteen, but there was more than four years difference between us. He was everything that a boy should be: devilish and full of life and fun; and if losing his father the year before had saddened him, it had done it in ways that didn’t show, except maybe in the way he attached himself to me right off. And although I wasn’t much more than a kid myself, I probably seemed old enough to be a father to him, or at least an older brother. I had been the man of our family for some time already, and was as somber and grim a Swede as ever took over running a farm.

We were hired in a package. If the truth were known, Kenny’s mother was probably being as much charitable as she was practical. But even then Mrs. Baker wasn’t a strong woman and she was a widow by that time, with this big farm and another smaller one to run, and no one to run it for her but a thirteen year old boy who worked hard enough when he wasn’t hiking through the woods hunting critters or taking off for the swimming hole.

That was how we’d come here. Olsen was to run the house and I, with some understandable doubts on Mrs. Baker’s part, would run the farm. Ingrid, well, she helped Olsen and tormented Kenny.

Even then the world revolved around Kenny. If things were hard, when bad weather threatened the crops, he’d work around the clock and weary the strongest hand. But let him hear that the catfish were good someplace, or let someone even hint at some bit of trouble he could be stirring up, and he was off and running. He would stand all of our hair on end, mine the straightest; and then, when we were the maddest and I was all for crating him up and dropping him in the creek after his catfish, in he’d saunter, as calm as the first day of May. I gave him credit: he never lied about things or ducked a question. He’d confess all in a way that said, “What are you upset about anyway? It was only an outhouse that I pushed over, and I didn’t even know Mr. Craig was in it.”

And of course, by the time he was done smiling at us and doing little favors for us, and fawning over us, we’d all be asking ourselves just what we had been so upset about. Except, while we were asking, he’d be off on some new mischief.

Or, if all else failed and he couldn’t soothe our anger any other way, he’d put on a face a mile long and then we would hear, “Nobody cares about me,” and the like, until we all felt sorry for having been mad and outdid one another showing him we did care. Olsen always said later that the only people who could afford to say such a thing were those who knew better. Kenny knew better, of course, but that didn’t stop him from using it to get his way.

When did it change? When did Kenny stop being the little kid that kept me hopping, the little brother I’d never had, and become something else, something crazy and undreamed of? I remember all, every day, every minute we spent together, but I don’t remember when it changed.

When the work was light, I’d many times go off with him, hiking and fishing. We found a cave, that was our place to escape from the world of work and responsibilities, and we spent hours there. Or we’d go swimming in the creek behind the pasture. I must have seen that bare ass of his a hundred times and never thought about anything more than walloping it when he made me mad, and he’d seen me raw as many times.

“Big Swede,” he called me, and he’d never admit it, but the one thing that really got him was that I was bigger down below than he was. Never mind that I was older. He couldn’t stand being second best in anything. I’d see him look down at himself and then at me, and frown.

“Look how big it’s getting,” he said over and over again. “I’ll bet I’m bigger than you before the year’s out.” He never quite made it, even though he swore he had.

Somehow it changed. The horseplay wasn’t just horseplay, and the wrestling tired us out more, so that we would lay for long times wrapped together and panting while we caught our breath—which got harder and harder to catch each time. I should have stopped it, I guess, being the older, but even though I was old in some ways, I was still a kid in my body.

I suppose a lot of it was just kid stuff. If you took any two young boys and put them on a farm, and sent them out wrestling and swimming naked together and let them become the closest of friends, the same thing would most likely happen. For Kenny, that’s probably all it ever was. But I can’t kid myself. Even from the first time anything happened, I knew I felt about him in a way that I had always expected I would feel about a woman someday. Afterward, after Kenny, I never felt that way about anyone else, man or woman. I was convinced that I never would—that I never could.

It started with the arguments about size. Not satisfied with seeing them soft, Kenny had to compare them hard, and even though I got a little shy about it, nothing would do but what he had to get his way. Two boys, all by themselves in a cave in the woods, cocks hard—somehow they had to be gotten soft again.

I was scared after the first time, and a little guilty too, I guess, but not Kenny. That devil had found a new game that he liked best of all, and to be honest he had less and less trouble each time persuading me to play.

All we did at first was play with one another, and sometimes it really was more of a game than anything else. We still argued about size and such, and I doubt if Kenny was ever happier than the day he found out he could shoot further than I could.

It went on like that for a while and then it kind of died down. We both outgrew it a little, I suppose, although occasionally we still played around like that. I was twenty-one by this time, and even though I still enjoyed and looked forward to those games of ours, I kept telling myself I was past the age when guys should be playing around with other guys.

As for Kenny, he had discovered girls and, for a year or so, that made a big difference. Of course, he had no more trouble persuading his new partners to play games with him than he had with me, and I guess he tried out that sport to his satisfaction, and to the dismay of a number of girls, who sent him notes and called at the house and otherwise pursued him. Thankfully none of them came up with any more evidence of their foolishness than broken hearts.

I thought that our fooling around was over—and in a sense it was. There was one girl Kenny had worked on for longer than the others, six months in all. He was seventeen then, going on eighteen, and as handsome a Romeo I swear as ever prowled the Ohio farmland. During those six months, we’d had none of our playing around, and I had pretty well gotten used to the idea that it was sadly over.

Then one night he came home from a dance he had been to with this girl—I don’t even remember her name now—and he came slipping down the hall to my room to wake me up and have a cigarette. Before, that would have been a sign that he wanted to play, but now I wasn’t sure, so I made no move in that direction, and for a while he didn’t either, but just lay there on the bed and smoked his cigarette and talked about a lot of little things.

“How’d you do with your girl?” I asked him finally, knowing by now that something was bothering him, but not knowing what.

“I made out,” he answered with his usual frankness.

“Great,” I said, without much enthusiasm.

“It’s funny, Mar,” he said, propping himself up on an elbow and looking at me in the moonlight that spilled through the window. “It’s not the same with a girl as it is with you.”

I laughed aloud at that. “I hope not,” I said finally.

Kenny remained serious though, and even that was a little bit unusual. “No, I mean it,” he insisted and then, after a pause, “Mar, do you want to? Now, I mean?”

I think I guessed that this time it was different, but saying no to Kenny was never easy, and downright impossible when I was in the mood myself, which I was just then.

“Sure, Ken.” I rolled over and took hold of him. He was higher on the bed than I was, so his belly was right in front of my face. I could smell the sweet, musty smell of his thighs, mingled with the scent of soap. He’d showered, I decided, before coming to my room.

“Put your mouth on it,” he said after a moment—not demanding, just asking in a quiet voice.

It gave me pause. We’d never done anything like that before, and I don’t think I’d ever thought about it, favorably or otherwise. But Kenny had asked. Knowing him, he probably hadn’t thought of it either before then, or he’d have mentioned it. Kenny wasn’t shy about what he wanted.

I had never thought about a cock being beautiful before, or even especially desirable in itself. It was something to have fun with and take pleasure with. But now I was staring at Kenny’s in a different way—and all of a sudden, it was beautiful. I stared at the head of it, mysteriously dark in the pale light, at the length of it, silky smooth and pale, with the faint color of veins running raggedly along it, like the marble on the dresser in Olsen’s room that had fascinated me so much when I was little. The hair at the base was already thick and glossy black. I could see his belly heaving up and down the way it did when he was excited.

I did what he’d asked, putting my lips lightly on the end of it. He let out his breath in a rush and moved slightly toward me.

“I like that,” he said in a whisper. He put his hands on my head, mussing my hair with his fingers, and coaxed me gently downward. “That’s nice.”

I didn’t know whether I liked it or not. It was strange tasting and kind of uncomfortable when it went into my throat. I choked on it and had to stop for a moment while he waited without moving, but I started in again and it got easier than it had been to begin with.

Of course Kenny was not about to be left out of anything new. “Let me try,” he said after a bit. And as usual he couldn’t go at it slowly and test the water. He had to swallow it all down like a starving man—and almost choked himself to death.

“Whew,” he said, gasping for breath and coughing. “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

“I want to fuck you,” I said on an impulse. That was the first time that idea had ever occurred to me, but now that the thought had come into my mind, I knew that I had wanted it that way for a long time.

“In the back?”

“Yes.”

If he’d said no, I’d have let it go at that. I was already scared at my audacity to even suggest it. He was always the one that thought up new stuff for us to do. But he thought about it for a minute and then he said simply, “Okay.”

Neither one of us knew how to go about it, and it took a while to figure out the right positions even. The two of us laughed a little, from nervousness and from our ignorance. But we got it figured out soon enough, and after a couple of bad tries, I got it started.

“Ouch,” he said. He had been holding his breath, and he let it out loudly and jerked away from me.

“Hurt?” I asked, pausing. I knew it had, as tight as he had felt. Half of me wanted to stop, but the other half wanted badly to go on.

“No,” he lied, and pushed back toward me. He wasn’t likely to admit that he couldn’t take it after he had agreed to it, and if I tried to stop now, he would have thought I considered him a baby.

I went on with it, taking it slow, trying to be gentle even though I was pretty clumsy at it. After a little, I could tell his reactions. I could feel him tense up each time I went a little deeper into him, and I would stop where I was, letting him get used to it. And when I felt him relax a little, I’d go on.

I had never been so excited over anything before, or so happy. It was more than just the physical pleasure of being in someone, although that was certainly thrilling enough. Kenny was giving himself to me, and I knew then, suddenly and beyond any question, that I loved him—loved the soft little cheeks brushing against my thighs as I pushed into him, loved the dark hair of his head that my face was buried in, loved the feel of my hand on his cock, hard still so that I knew what I was doing had not turned him off.

I think the little devil learned to like it. He started pushing it back to me after a while, and wriggling around. He kept getting harder and harder in my hand and then suddenly he stiffened and came, shooting over my hand and his belly and wetting the bedclothes. His body shook and convulsed the way it did when he came, and I made it a minute behind him, emptying myself far up inside him, hugging the breath from him. He took it all without a complaint and afterward he laughed and called me “Big Swede,” but he didn’t mean it the way he had before.

It never happened again. When my desire went, it was replaced by a river of guilt that suddenly separated me from him. I was ashamed of what we had done—of what I had done. It was wrong, I was sure of it, and crazy. We weren’t kids anymore, we were men, and men didn’t do things like this.

Kenny was puzzled at first, and later angry. He never did understand why I was upset. “What’s wrong with it?” he wanted to know, arguing with me in tense whispers. “We both liked it, didn’t we? I liked it better than with girls, Mar, I really did. It’s not like it was anybody else, it’s you and me. Hell, I’d do it again. Right now, if you want to.

“No.” I jerked away from him when he tried to reach for me. He would have done it again right then, I knew. He was like that. One time just made him hungrier for the next. “Let me alone.”

I said it sharper than I meant to, and in a tone I had never used with him before, and it hit home. Even without looking at him, I knew I had hurt him. He didn’t say anything after that.

“Go to bed,” I said finally. I was tired all of a sudden, and mixed up. And the worst of it was, I wanted it too, again, but not badly enough.

Kenny didn’t have any guilt of his own, I’m sure of it, but some of mine rubbed off on him. The next day, it was all different between us. He didn’t look straight at me when we were around each other, and we didn’t say anything more to each other than we had to. When I went to bed that night, I saw him give me a funny looked. He wanted a sign, I know, or some word that told him everything was okay, but I didn’t give him any. He came to bed later and stopped at my room, opening the door and sticking his head inside.

“Mar,” he said in a whisper, “You asleep?”

I wasn’t, but a pretended I was. I never was a good liar. He knew I was pretending, and that must have hurt most of all. He waited a minute or two and then he went on to his own room, and I spent the whole night staring up at the ceiling and wishing he were in bed with me, curled up in my arms.

* * * * * * *

That was the last time he ever came down to my room at night. I came to hate myself for what I had done—not for screwing around like we had, but for hurting him the way I had, and shutting him out. I prayed for weeks that he would try again and I knew if he did that I would say, “yes” without any hesitation.

Right or wrong, good or bad, he had tormented my every dream at night, and through the whole day I couldn’t think of anything but Kenny—loving him, wanting him. I was nearly crazy from it all. I tried everything I could think of to show him how I felt, that it was all right now. A hundred times I suggested we go for a hike in the woods, or go into town together, or wrestle in the barn. He wasn’t having any, though. I had refused him once, something nobody had ever done before, and I wasn’t to have a second chance.

The worst of it was that he wanted it too. He hadn’t lied about liking what we had done. This was a whole new game for him and he wanted to play it to the hilt. But he was stubborn as an ox, and when he played again, it wasn’t with me.

I suppose, in a sense, I was the one who drove him to Dexter Holloman. From that standpoint, I was the cause of the storm that brewed during those following months. When it broke finally, it was sudden and furious, and in the end it swept Kenny away from us.

Strange to say, though, I probably suffered the least when Kenny left, disappearing one day to remain gone for five long years. Not that I didn’t miss him, in a way that none of the others could share, or even imagine; but for me, he had gone earlier.

He had left me after that night in my room. He had come back to Hanover, to the farm, but he had never come back to me.