Excerpted from Through It Came Bright Colors
Winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Fiction

Vince went like a dam in the end—one with his enormous, beautiful, Lenin-esque, Che Guevara of a face painted on it, rupturing and disintegrating in slow motion, swallowed by water. But it wasn’t water in his case, it was junk, and the river was a needle, and when that dam broke our whole story disappeared into the tender, exposed vein in the crotch of his elbow.

Peter got morphine once after surgery, and he said, ‘yeah, I can understand.’

He’s a dam too. But the river in him washed over us; washes us still.

He’s ringing his bell for me now. He rings it when he needs me at night. My mother would gladly run to him, but he can’t handle her over-concern anymore, so he’s let it be known that the bell rings only for me.

The bell is old and brass, painted in blues and greens and shaped almost like a bird claw. It has a hollow, faraway sound like the bells they use in Catholic churches when they lift up the host—this is my body.

He’s grinning when I reach his room after padding down the stairs in the dark, but his grin isn’t big like most people’s. He has scars, big, red and keloid, and they’ve had to cut some of his nerves besides, so it’s a baby’s smile, uncoordinated—the kind of smile that makes you cheer and want to tell people about it.

I smile back, fearing my smile looks sorry, and I get him up out of the wetted-bed and help him sit up in the old kitchen chair in the corner, where he holds his legs close together and his head tilted to the side and forward as if to cradle the hole in his cheek where the tumor had been; the hole it had returned to, once again to grow. Cancer abhors a vacuum? A fallow field? Cancer spits at my silly clichéd metaphors. Cancer’s a cad and does whatever it wants.

“English bed-wetting type,” I mutter mock-disgustedly in a French accent, mimicking Monty Python. I always try to make it fun, but inside I’m my mother too, sorrowful and vaguely horrified. He starts guffawing as I proceed with my little pantomime because he can’t laugh right either with his still-sutured scars and cut nerves. He starts to say ‘stop, stop’ because it pains him to laugh and he’s rearing his head up to ease the discomfort, like a little kid wriggling away from a belly tickle.

“O.K., O.K., I’ll try not to crack you up,” but I know through the pain I’ve made him happy and I’m glad. I’m like my father that way, ready with a joke. I don’t know what’s best—I only know that I want to make him happy. If it comes to that, I want him to be laughing when the great toilet bowl of the world pulls him down.

I help him struggle out of his pajama shirt and pants, and throw them in a pile on the floor near the door, turning to get a fresh pair from the dresser, which takes me back ten years because it’s that same old dresser from when we were kids and no one was ever sick and I wasn’t even aware of being gay yet and our parents, if we thought of them at all, weren’t little and fragile like they seemed to have become now. We were safe then. Well, relatively. There was still my vicious older brother Paul, who hounded me night and day. But he’s since moved to the East Coast and rarely returns. And after all that’s happened this year, our squabbling seems like small change.

But he left a hole too, I can’t deny that. It’s just that I don’t see holes the same anymore.

I pull out the fresh sheets and a pair of pajama bottoms, which I hand to Peter, hoping he’ll be able to put them on himself. I change the sheets, watching out of the corner of my eye as he puts first one leg, then the next, into the pajama pants. He’s such a beautiful man I think to myself, his body so perfectly formed. It’s odd to see him struggle, he who’d always done everything physical with such grace and ease. Persistent, he gathers the pajamas above his ankles, and then pulling himself up, and steadying one arm on the chair back, he yanks them up with the other hand.

“Pretty good,” I cheer, “pretty darn good,” and I turn and go to him, steadying his shoulders with my hands, guiding him toward the cleaned-up bed, and helping him on with the shirt. Then we get him settled back into bed—his body almost like a third thing between us that together we carefully handle, like a delicate and valuable piece of art. Tucking him in, I lean down on one knee to comb the hair across his sweating brow with my hand, careful not to touch his face so swollen with the scars. I have to gulp a breath of air to stave off my tears, which are hanging around, almost loitering, like someone in a room who looks like they might have something to say, but hangs back, shy and unsure.

Well, he’s two people too. Cancer does that I guess. He’s still the stoic athlete who heals faster than he should and never cries or complains, a picture of self-reliance, whose mantra is ‘fall down, get back up again’ (some coach taught him that I suppose); but he’s also a little kid again—in the middle of the night, or when the pain is bad, or if he’s helpless (showers and too many Percodans)—and wholly incongruous to our daytime hero, wanting to be taken care of and held and stroked and made to laugh. At first I was confused, even embarrassed by it, but then I saw in it an ability to invite and accept love in a way I knew I could never do myself. Yet, it made me feel strong, even as I doubted myself, for it made me useful; he made it easy like a child does. I had a strange desire to thank him all the time, but that seemed as ridiculous as his acting like a little kid, and in my befuddlement, I just let him thank me.

“What have you been dreaming of, Peter?”

“Mountains,” he smiles. He grins widely, and I see the half of his teeth that still remain. He grins because we have a dream of mountains. And it’s become a bedtime story, recounting all the places we’ve backpacked together and thinking up new ones still to come.

“Peter, we’ll go packin’ as soon as this is over. How about it? You wanna? Hike way out there.”

“Yeah, let’s go packin’, that would be great,” he replies, as if he were rehearsing his lines in a play because this is a ritual, this dream.

“You just stay busy thinking of a place to go, Peter. Anywhere you want,” I respond, taking my cue, as I further tuck him in.

“Tell me Neill, describe a place.”

I pause to think for a minute, and it all comes flooding back. All those places we’d gone over the last 3 or 4 summers, to get away from home, or school, or work, or all those things closing in on us as we grew older. Actually, I think he went just because he liked it there. Peter was easy. But for me, it was about getting away from people; the world. I was queer and angry and unable to do anything about it back then. I’d longed for a world that loved me anyway, despite it, which wasn’t what I was seeing in Republican America, at church on Sundays, or amid the bantering of the ‘in crowd’ at school. What I loved about the mountains was that they were that world.

So it’s easy for me to tell him about a place and a once-upon-a-time.

“There’s a place, Peter, where you never been. It’s a meadow called Bear and the bears are thick as bees there—scared me to death when I first saw it.” He grins at my gross exaggeration. “The pines, as usual, standing around; snow on the peaks; slopes of fir; and the mules ears grass and wild onions bunched up along the stream ... Bear Meadow must have been a good mile across at its widest, and it was arced up, like swollen, like a pregnant belly. It was bright green, the grass was, chartreuse almost, and the sky vivid blue. I’d been out for a week or so, scrambled over 3 passes, camping by lakes where you could see the submerged logs and rocks lying 20 feet below, or along rushing streams, rocky and messed with boulders, going who knows. And no food lost to bears, Peter—imagine that!” He offers a wan smile of acknowledgment. “Anyway, I’m coming through this watershed when I see it ahead of me up through these boulders. I got a full pack, 50 pounds, blisters, I’m slogging loud through the pine needles, anxious now to get there, loud enough so that the first bear that saw me wasn’t surprised. Just right after that exhilarating feeling of MEADOW! I noticed him: BEAR!! He was looking right at me as I stopped and swallowed. He was sitting on his haunches next to an eaten-up, rotten old cedar log lying in the grass. He’d been digging in it I figured for ants or termites or something because he was licking his paw like they do when they dig in logs. He was comic and terrifying all at once. But he just sat there as I froze in terror—he didn’t move, he didn’t startle, he just kept chewing ants and licking his paws, unperturbed like an old Buddha—the sky damn blue, Peter; damn blue. And me petrified. I never know what to do with fear like that in a place so beautiful and so full of peace. I just started backing away. . . .”

By then, Peter’s breathing the soft breath of sleep, and he’s probably missed the best part. He’ll catch up with it in his dreams I hope. I take my own story’s advice and back away, turning off the lights and half-closing the door, catching the one tear that gets loose and smearing it across my cheek, snorting it up so Mom won’t suspect anything when she whispers for me upstairs, ever unable to sleep through that bell.

“He’s O.K., Ma—just spilled his glass of water. I changed the bed. It’s all taken care of.” A feeble ‘thank you, honey’ floats out of the darkness as I pull her door to a near-close and head to my own room. There’s a faint moonlight across my bed, tangled with the shadows of the softly swaying branches of the big oak outside my window, and it’s as if there is a sort of map laid out upon my bedspread. I lie there wide awake, following its rivers and trails, dreaming a place, still intoxicated with my love of the mountains that’s gotten all mixed up with my love of my little brother. I long to get back up there, high above the world, where things are clear and there’s room to sort it all out.

On our last trip together, Peter and I had gone up over the rim of Yosemite, far up Illilouette Creek, the massive face of Half Dome at our backs, watching over us, its clipped bell curve shape mimicking an image of the Virgin Mary in her mantel, silent, present, like a last ruin of the faith we’d been raised with.

We’d climbed in silence up out of the valley, huffing and puffing. At first we passed many hikers along the forested trail, but they thinned-out rapidly the higher we climbed. Occasionally, we stopped to rest, and then we’d look back down behind us through the trees to the valley as it receded further and further away until it was only a toy world, almost unreal. It was amazing how quickly we got above it; how quickly it became a little model railroad world with tiny trees and cars and little people, and even a miniature river—and the big stones were probably just little rocks placed here and there, the whole distant valley and its immense sheer walls, a Plaster of Paris creation.

When we reached Illilouette Falls—they dropped 2000 feet, nearly to the valley floor before being lost in a tumble of boulders and granite terraces that followed the canyon down into the valley—we turned inland and headed up the creek to where no one but the ‘serious’ backpackers went; off to find our sanctuary. Inland from the rim, the forest grew denser, pines spiraling into the sky, the scattered debris of stone and fallen trees surrounding us. Now there was only the silence, punctuated by the quiet sounds of distant birds, creaking branches, and the occasional chirp of a chipmunk or the snap of a branch; forlorn wind in the high tree tops.

Hours later, we set up camp along the creek, just under some overhanging stones behind which lay an enormous sloping meadow of flowers and sparse grass among sand and gravel and downed, blanched-white, barkless pine logs. Peter made a Frisbee golf course out of the big pines and scattered boulders and we played into the afternoon. It was the endless space around us that relaxed us as our voices echoed and our muscles relaxed after straining all day. There were no limits to this game and we could have thrown our Frisbee around over a hundred miles with nothing but empty wilderness to impede us. It was an Edenic world, spacious and unhampered by cancer and dogma, hatred and mean older brothers, the past and all things that tried to contain us.

With dusk we cleared areas to lay our sleeping bags under the sheltering pines and big rocks. I watched Peter as long shadows and golden light slowed everything down so that each act, each movement or gesture, took on a significance rarely noticed down below. He’d gone to hang the food in a tree so as to prevent its capture by bears. I stayed behind to build a fire, but turned to watch him without his knowing it. I watched him tie a rock up in a thin rope and then toss it high and up over a branch. It took him a few tries, and once the rock came loose from the rope and nearly beaned him on the head. He jumped aside comically, never seeing me laugh. When he got the rope up over the tree branch, he evened it out and tied one bag to one end, hoisting it high up by yanking down on the other end of the rope. I watched his biceps flex, holding the rope taut. And then he put the rope in his mouth, holding it there so he could proceed to tie the other bag. He saw me then, and smiled through his clenched teeth. I thought almost instinctively with such suddenness: I love him; he’s such a person. It sounded ridiculous, but that’s all I could think of. There was something so utterly and unselfconsciously human and animal about him. I never saw him get frustrated, as I often did on these trips, with ropes and knives and cut fingers and binding, temperamental straps on shoulders. His body worked with it all patiently, watching me almost with wonder when I’d fight myself.

He had nothing to fight—not then.

The lord giveth and the lord taketh away—the cheap, Indian-giving bastard.

Yet, what never failed to surprise me was how, far from leaving a hole, all this loss left a window, a doorway—and through it came bright colors; through it come bright colors still.

 

Read an interview with Trebory Healey by Mike McGinty

More Information about Through It Came Bright Colors at:
http://treborhealey.com/

 

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