- DISCLAIMER - The following story, novel, or chapter contains homosexual themes and is not intended for anyone under the legal viewing age - If depictions of homosexual activities disturb you - Do Not Continue To Read This Story - Feedback appreciated Copyright - 2005 - Max Williams (Kollegekid54321@hotmail.com)
Chapter 5
"You were out late last night", Pam Colby told her son the next morning. Jason had come bounding down the stairs, smiling and cheerful. He had on an old sleeveless white T shirt that fit him so snugly around the chest that the brown of his skin showed through, and some old jeans with rips in the knees. The Saturday morning was bright and cheerful, and spring sunshine streamed through the little double hung windows of Jason's small kitchen. His mother was looking at him suspiciously, and with a personal fierceness that immediately birthed a little guilt in him.
"Umm, yeah . . . sorry about that. The guys and I were playing pretty late - but I remember to get Dad and come home -
"Mmmph" Jason was startled and turned around to see his father already in the kitchen, standing leaning against the cabinets in the corner, buried in the newspaper. Phil Colby looked pretty red around the eyes, and his lips were so dry that Jason thought he may have been throwing up. Well, hangovers were a bitch, but if Phil knew how to deal with anything, it was a hangover. A hot cup of black coffee lived in his right hand most mornings, and he had a remarkably efficient way of channeling the pain of his headaches into the vociferousness of his actions - for better or for worse. "You were an hour late", Phil grumbled toward his son.
"Yeah, I know, the guys and I ran late - it wont happen again"
"You're damn right it wont", his mother broke back in, "you're not getting the car again until you can prove you know how to use it."
"What? Mom!"
"No, that's it. Now sit down and shut up." Normally Jason would've fought the issue, but something about the fierce way that Pam kept glancing at her husband while yelling at her son made him rethink his stance. Something had happened that Jason didn't now about, and the muttering, angry, shuttered look on his miserable father's unshaven face probably had something to do with it. Jason put up his hands in acquiescence, took the plate of store bought waffles and toast from his mother, and sat at the kitchen table.
For a moment Pam Colby looked at her son. The morning light was glinting off his shiny brown hair, and for a boy that she had raised, she had to admit that he had grown into quite a man. His square jaw was munching on the toast that she had made, and his boyishly charming, yet angled and masculine face was covered with a slight layer of stubble that he needed to shave soon. His apparent biceps were flexing most attractively as he bent his arms to eat his food, and she marveled at the thought of what girls would enjoy themselves looking at that strong back and those broad shoulders. The brown of his skin was a testament to the amount of time he spent in the sun playing sports, and Pam's mind drifted to the girls that probably watched him while he was doing so. Her mind drifted to a time when she was a young woman, unsure and unconfident in a college that she didn't like, and sat on the same hill every day watching the sports teams practice. It was Pam's "in" almost, when she happened to have a class once with a meek little guy that happened to be on the football team, though he spent most of the time on the bench. She and he became great friends because of what she was sure he could offer her, and she was positive that through him, she might possibly get to be in the in crowd at Buffalo State. That man's name was Phil, and Pam shook her head as she skipped over the years of disappointments between then and now. Meek, reclusive, and with a hidden temper, Phil had been advertised as a good deal, and finally, Pam had finally settled for him, and bought. But he wasn't part of the in crowd any more than she was, and she was left with a disappointment that she'd never gotten over. And now . . . now that same man was standing in the corner of her kitchen, after coming home smelling like rum and throwing up on her carpet . . . she couldn't believe her life. It made her . . . it made her angry.
"Are you done with that", she asked her son. Jason wasn't, quite, but nodded and gave his mother his empty breakfast plate. His mother had been eating at the counter, like she always did, watching to see when Jason had finished. His father was rarely ever around for breakfast and Jason considered it a good day that Phil was there, even if he was only reading the paper with glazed eyes. And Jason always ate at the table, like he had since he was a little kid and it had been a family tradition. But his family had changed so much since then . . . pretty much since Maggie had left. Wow, Maggie . . . Jason didn't think about her much these days.
Margaret Colby was Jason's older sister, and though she didn't come around very often, or stay long when she did, he often worried about her. She had tried college, she had tried working, she had tried living with her boyfriend that supposedly was "going to support her". Jason was suddenly amazed that such a close member of his family could be let go so easily, but the truth was the truth, and that was that Maggie hadn't visited for almost eight months now, and yet said that she lived in town, fairly close by. It was a sad situation that she worked minimum wage doing . . . they didn't even know what and living . . . they didn't even know where and neither of his parents had the slightest interest in finding out. That had been the wedge that had been allowed to drive his family apart, Jason thought. The problems with Maggie had been the infection that had understandably grown in the emotional gashes his parents were always leaving, and though the catalyst of the infection had gone, the infection was still there. It was in her unsuccessful life, and it was in everything that she did. And the gashes were still at home, this time severing parent from parent and parent from child, as Pam and Phil clawed out to cling to some chunk of satisfaction, when really, they only clawed at the air; only at each other. Jason worried sometimes that he needed to change things before the same thing happened to him, but then again, he had enough to worry about with high school. Raising his parents wasn't something he wanted to do, especially when the parents had decided they were okay. Especially when he had enough on his mind already. For some reason Fredo took that moment to pop into his mind. Fuck!, he thought. The last thing I need to think about. These, he decided, were the kind of depressing thoughts that smiles were for.
The sunlight still streamed through the small double hung windows of the Colby's kitchen. The small room was bright and pleasant, but the atmosphere was almost black. Pam stood at the sink, watching the water run over the dirty dish she was supposed to be cleaning, buried in thought. Phil still stood in the corner, gently massaging his stomach with a bruised hand, looking at the paper but clearly not reading. And Jason, turned inward from the kitchen table with his hefty arm thrown nonchalantly over the back of his chair, was gazing downward, also lost in his thoughts. How ridiculously uninvolved all these people were. And Jason, snapping back into reality, took a deep breathy sigh and then plastered his everyday, non-bothered smile on his face and got up.
"Well, I'm doing a lot today, I've got to go but Ill be back later", he said, walking as he spoke so that hopefully he'd be up the stairs before his parents could rebuff him.
"Wait -" Crap, no such luck. Pam continued, "You can't
use the car."
"Ill walk", Jason called from the second step.
"No, you can't go. I've got - I've got some things that I need to do outside, and I need your help. Don't waste your time, do something useful." Jason took a deep breath.
"Mom, just because what I'm doing doesn't help you, doesn't mean it's not useful. I've got homework to work on - and yesterday was Meghan's parent's anniversary; I should go see her -"
"Funny, you didn't come to my anniversary party."
"Mom, everyone left your party because you were three hours late."
"I had to work late!"
"You've never had to work late before."
"Look, this isn't the point, you hurt me and any normal son would want to make it up to me. Besides, you can go see them any other day, its not like you have to be there."
"But I HAVE to be here."
"Don't take that tone with me!"
"Mom, I'm not, I'm just tired of being commandeered for your -"
"I said DON'T take that tone with me!!"
Even with the room dividing them, Jason knew that she was using her look so piercing that it could transcend walls. He was pissed off, he wanted out of this crazy house, and he wanted to be comfortable. And she apparently needed him to stay home and hand her her tools while she gardened, a thoroughly pointless job that meant he would probably be standing in the unpleasant combination of hot sun and cold air until dinner. He blanched.
"I'm NOT taking a tone, and I'm NOT staying here." Jason ran up the remaining stairs and flew into him room, slamming the door behind him. He quickly tore the t-shirt off his lean body and threw a loose sweatshirt over his taut skin before he heard his mother pounding up the stairs behind him. He ran to his door and locked it before she could - fuck - the lock was still sitting on the floor. He looked around. The window? Wait - that was crazy; this woman was mad, not homicidal. At least, that's what he thought before she burst the door open, eyes flashing, mouth grimacing, and breathing hard with anger.
"Look you little horse's ass -" But Pam's statement was left unsaid as Jason simply brushed past her and quickly went back down the stairs, leaving whatever it was that he wanted in his room, in his room. He finished the stairs and grabbed his sneakers, opened the front door and quietly shut it again, jumped off the small concrete stoop, went around the side of the house and then pressed himself flat against the siding, out of the view of the front living room windows. He pulled on his old sneakers as he heard the sounds of blinds being pulled up and his mother calling for his father to help her find him, and knew that he had about three minutes to escape while his mother got exasperated and returned to the kitchen to bodily force his father back to the wide picture window. He hunkered down, ready to jog down the street when he heard the blinds stop rustling, and spent one-tenth of a second formulating the thought, I wonder if other families use this tactic to get the gardening done, before he heard some heavy footsteps and some yelling of the word "PHIL". Jason ran.
Light streamed into the blackened room and some of the wetness had been dried. The shutters hung in scraps off their rusted hinges, and piles of soft, black wood on the floor was testament to their fragile condition to begin with. The cloth in the room was disintegrating in so much sunlight and the wallpaper and woodwork weren't faring well with the sudden acclimation to a vaguely drier atmosphere. But none of that mattered much to the man that was wandering around the room, pulling furniture away from the walls, pulling drawers out of dressers, and lifting the carpets where rotted holes had given access to the squishy wood floor underneath. His skin was still yellow, and his eyes were still bloodshot. He had regained much of his strength, and much of his memory, but like most people that live to be one hundred-and-thirty-five, had some trouble remembering the details.
Once he had come to terms with walking again, he'd ventured out of the bedroom and found much of the rest of this, his home, to be in similar shape. Everything was blackened and boarded over, covered with soot or mold, or the carcasses of animals that had crawled in the house to die. His furniture was ruined; the contents of every drawer had turned to piles of mush with the intense water damage coming through the skylight over the stairs. The back door was a pile of splinters; the result of a robbery, certainly, which would also account for the shambles in the dining room, the broken china cabinet, and the missing silver dinnerware.
But none of that was important, he knew. His ultimate mission had worked, and even if the contents of his house hadn't lasted as well as he'd hoped, even if the accumulation of his lifetime of work had been stained by the ravages of time, he was still alive. He was still himself . . . if he had any idea what that meant. Sure, he'd found some monogrammed silver, and some scraps of correspondence, but he didn't know what the letters WRM stood for or who they pertained too. All the man had was a vague sense of something sinister when he had found that letter, dated 1895, between William Renault Montgomery and Roberto Richiazzi. The man had a sense that he had lived with other men for a time, before building this house - was he William? Or was that one of the other men? The man didn't know.
He crossed the bedroom and looked into the path of crystal clear mirror that he had made in the layers of grime veering the rest of the glass. His face, his scarred, ugly, yellow face was hideous. The man had found shaving implements in the bathroom and had tried to remove the beard and the hair, but unsuccessfully. His arms and legs were still morbidly stiff, and the razor was dull. The cuts he'd made in his face did nothing - they wouldn't bleed, they wouldn't heal. The man was scared for what he'd become, and let his mind wonder about if he really was still human, as he'd been promised he would be. But damnit, that was what he was looking for!
In a wave of frustration, he ripped open the dresser drawers and dumped out their contents on the sodden carpet. Blackened papers, rotted quills, rotted hairbrush, broken hand mirror . . . normal objects to store in a dresser. The damned letter! The one thing that the man remembered clearly, almost as crystal clearly as the mirror, was himself, seated at a desk, licking, blessing, and sealing an envelope with his wax and seal, and giving it to a man. He couldn't remember the man, and couldn't remember the date, the location, or the contents, but had this overwhelming sense that he had written to himself, in case this happened, of what had been done, and why. And he had no idea where the letter was now. Or if, indeed, it was one of the impossibly black and rotted papers that he'd been finding all over his house.
The man returned to the bay window and looked out for the innumerable time. The mass of gray stone still perplexed him, as did the surroundings. He had built his house on a densely populated street in Buffalo that he had loved. The street itself had been made of brick, and stretched from the park across town to the edge of the Niagara River, which his house, one of the taller manses, what with the skylight and tower, had overlooked. The street had been filled with large homes, set back from the street, shaded by graceful trees. And now, stark barren streetlamps - he wasn't sure - stood over that confounded expanse of gray. He remembered that being the Cremshaw's big square house. And the street itself, more gray, disappearing to the left in a clump of wild trees, beyond which was an overgrown and wild looking drop to some train tracks, and beyond that was the Niagara. Blue and calming, he had always loved the water, and remembered when the red brick street had gone right down to the ferry launch at the river's edge. The train tracks had always carried the New York Central line from Buffalo to Niagara Falls, and he remembered getting off at the Ferry St stop at 5:15 every day, seeing the Cremshaws on their porch, coming to the his house, being let in by the housekeeper, being told "Good Evening Mr. . . Mr. . . ." Damnit! He had to find that letter!
The man swore out loud, although no sound came out. He hadn't successfully spoken yet, instead producing the sound of sandpaper on concrete. He still felt dry and fragile, and knew he needed to find some water. Nothing was on in the house, and his foray into the bathroom had shown that the water had been off for years. He'd also tried both the gas lights and the archaic electrical system that he vaguely remembered of, and found that they, too, had been shut off.
He kicked the remains of the shutters under the remains of a chair and walked right up to the window. Where would he have hidden it? The man had a vague sense that in life an inappropriate term given that he still had life, or so he thought, he wasn't sure - he had been very clever. Would he have accounted for things rotting like this? Would he have known to put a letter in a more secure spot than a drawer? The man desperately hoped so, and felt the beginnings of panic start to squelch his otherwise elated mood.
He turned and ran out of the bedroom into the cavernous hallway. It was large and wide, and a wide, square, heavily ornamented staircase corkscrewed up against the opposite wall. The space left inside the turning stairs provided a view up to the smudged and broken skylight that sat high up on the roof. The man vaguely remembered the space being shaped differently, and thought possibly that there had been a stained glass window in the ceiling below the skylight.
He looked down through the middle of the stairs as he descended them, and found that he was right. The shards of colored glass lay on the inlaid and water stained floor of the entrance hall on the first storey. Surely, if he'd been so clever, he would also have accounted for the house falling apart? The man stopped in the middle of the entrance hall and thought for a moment. As blackened and wet as the rest of the house, the room was of wide proportions and generous height. A low hanging tarnished chandelier with six arms hung from an elaborated beamed ceiling, although two of the beams had rotted and crashed to the floor, destroying the delicate serpentine furniture and marble topped tables that had been arranged around the room, out of the way of the sweeping base of the stairs. One of the beams had even made a substantial hole in the floor, around which squishy wood showed that the floor had been long fragile before the beam came down. The man looked through the hole and pondered. The basement? Surely that room had been wet even during his life, would he have stashed it down there? It was one of the few places in the house he hadn't looked. He turned to find the basement stairs, when something suddenly occurred to him.
Seized with a sudden burst of fortitude, the man grabbed the beam that still stuck out of the floor, and shoved it away from the opening. The cracked remains of the marble top of the table managed to shift and before the man could catch them, fell though the hole in the floor and hit below. He grumbled, the last thing he needed were things making the unstable house less stable, and he distinctly heard wood crack - wood? The basement floor was all stone flags, as he remembered. He looked through the hole again and saw almost nothing, but couldn't imagine what had happened. Weighing his options, he took a dry breath with his dusty lungs and jumped through the hole in the floor.
Jason turned around. He'd been doing that all morning, and didn't really know what else to do. He'd been walking up and down the length of Montgomery Avenue all morning, and most of the afternoon now, but without his wallet he couldn't stop at a restaurant, and the booksellers refused admittance without a shirt - his sweatshirt didn't count he'd tried. What a fucking Saturday. He'd thought about trudging the blocks back to his house, but walking up and down a street seemed like less torture. He was nearly to the traffic circle for the second time, and figured this was a waste of time. The park was going to be open until the sun set, so he may as well go rest his feet for a while.
Half an hour later he got to the circle and turned left through the massive gates, and was deciding where would be the best place to sit and possibly watch some of the girls going by when he heard his name. Instinctively, he ducked his head and looked round - fuck - they found him - how the hell - oh. It was a Jeep approaching him, not his parent's sensible little Acura. And in the Jeep were three guys that Jason was insanely pleased to see.
Trevor was driving the thing in his responsible way, although Sean was sticking his arms out the window to get Jason's attention. He saw Dave Pellegrino in the back seat too, and laughed, waving to them as they pulled to a halt along the winding road that led into Capetown Park.
"Hey Jase - what're you doing?!" Sean was still wildly waving his arms around, although grinning like a madman. Trevor was usually more restrained than Sean, and sat in the driver's seat, obviously unhappy at idling so much gas away, but still happy at having found Jason. Dave was Dave, and that was enough said. The kid was crazy.
"Hey - nothing much. I've been hanging out in fucking town all day; it sucks. What are you guys doing here?!"
"Dude - we've been calling you all day - your mom kept saying you didn't want to talk to us."
"Wha -"
"Yeah, so we stopped by your house just now and she said you'd been on the strip all day. Dude - you remember Greg's party is tonight, right? We came to pick you up." Jason immediately remembered the plans he had made the day he had fainted in Music Theory. He slapped his forehead, and smiled at his friends.
"Oh yeah, oh yeah I'm going. C'mon, gimme a ride Trev."
"Sure thing", Trevor said, happy to be on the road again. Jason, smiling genuinely for the first time that day, went and jumped into the back of the Jeep, and they were off. Trevor had to spend a minute driving around the park to get back to the main gate on the one-car road.
"Hey Jason, how're you", said Dave, grinning at Jason.
"Hey, I'm fine man. What's up with you?"
"Nothing much. I'm stoked about this fucking party." Jason laughed; Dave was the kind of kid that got "stoked" if he passed a urine test. He was still grinning at Jason in a way that used to unnerve him, before Jason realized that was the whole point of Dave's existence. Nowadays, he ignored it and played along with the crazy, but funny, kid.
"That's awesome man. So where's Greg live?"
"Up in that Garden Acres shit", Trevor said. "You know all those new, fucking huge houses that look over the lake? His parents are gone and he's got the whole fucking place." Trevor smiled, and added, "We're getting wasted" with a glint in his eye. He may have played by the rules, but he knew how to break them too.
"Hey Jase - you want to go home and get changed?" Sean had been smiling into the wind of the open Jeep but now smiled at Jason in the rear view mirror.
"Oh yeah", Jason said. "That'd be fine. I'm not that much bigger than you - anything you've got that's baggy should fit me okay -"
"No, Jase", Sean said, looking confused, "I meant your home. You want to go get out of your sweats?" Jason immediately smiled to cover his natural reaction. No, he didn't want to go back -
"No, that's actually okay. My parents aren't home anyway."
"Umm . . . but yeah they are. We were just there", Sean said.
"Oh, yeah, but . . . I know they're going out tonight, and I think they said they'd be gone around six."
"It's five", Trevor said.
"Oh. Yeah, but they're probably getting ready, and I don't want to disturb them."
"It's not disturbing them to run in and get a shirt", Dave countered.
"Right, but then I'd have to stop and talk, and I just want to get going. Besides, I was supposed to be at Meghan's at five anyway, because her parents had their anniversary yesterday."
"Didn't you go over there last night?" Sean asked.
"Um . . . yeah, but I forgot their present."
"Wouldn't that be at your house?" Trevor asked, looking quizzically into the rear view mirror.
Jason was silent for a moment. "No."
"Yeah"
"No"
"Yeah"
"No"
"Yeah"
"Yeah"
"No"
"Exactly", Jason said triumphantly. "So I don't need to go home." Jason smiled his carefree smile into the rearview mirror back at Trevor, who shook his head. Sean gave Trevor a let-it-go kind of wave-off, and Dave stared at Jason for a minute, before bursting into laughter.
"Dude", Dave said, "You fucking rock!"