Gap-toothed, sunburnt, corn-yellow crewcut. He was a real southern boy.

Every summer, in every Kingdom Hall he had gone to, one like Seth had bloomed, utterly ripe for the biggest sin there was.

Blue eyes, dimples, a constellation of zits around his nose. Heavy eyebrows that tattooed his forehead.

Damian found it easy to pick him out, there in the Kingdom Hall parking lot. He knew the craven stare that boys wear when they feel experimental, something in those drippy eyes that burn. He could see the lust seeping through his meeting shirt, patches of sweat that were making it wrinkle and stick and look like it had to come off.

The kid was practically begging to get it on with another guy.

The concept made Damian gag, but he was willing to suppress that reflex for the sake of the task at hand. It was the gravest Witness crime. He could be a child of Satan within the hour.

Besides, he needed to widen the circle of his new family. He told himself that it was normal to want to be surrounded by people who had to climb up and over the same heap of dogma dogshit that he had to. Already, Alicia and Zeke and Jody were beginning to feel more like his real family than the people in his house who’d shat him out and given him a blood type so many years ago.

“Hey dude,” Damian called out from the Firebird.

“What.”

“Get in.”

“Yer that guy.”

“So what if I am?” Damian said.

Seth had to nudge Baby Smurf between them because the plushy doll had been riding shotgun. He stripped off his meeting shirt, gave it a freshness sniff, and tossed it into the backseat.

This brown-muscled statue probably spent whole summers outside.

Damian promised himself that he wouldn’t retch on dude’s naked lap when the time came. Like anyone else on the planet, Seth had the right to a vomit-free first time.

“Where can we have some fun?” Damian said. “I need to celebrate my first week in town.”

“We can go to the stock cars.”

“What’s the fastest way to get there?”

“Left. Well, it’s better if we go right. Not faster, but—”

“I get it. You think rebels always do the opposite of what they’re supposed to? It’s not that simple.”

“Naw, there’s a bunch of idiots around the corner who get on my ass.”

“They beat on you?”

“Call me ‘Bible Boy’ and such.”

That twang. ‘Bible’ sounded like babble.

“Kicking their ass would be more fun than stock cars, no?”

Damian tooled out of the Kingdom Hall parking lot and around the corner, where the creeps were chugging beer on the hood of a pick-up truck to a soundtrack of Florida death metal. One of them was getting a blowjob, and he tried to balance his beer can on the mess of blond hair swishing in front of his crotch.

“That’s them.”

They swooped in closer, burning rubber over the curb. Seth hawked up a loogie and spat it out the window.

“Sheee-i-i-i-it. I got his face!”

Damian studied the side mirror to see what Seth’s gob had done. It was amazing how a little saliva could send someone into such a hooting rage, how potent a DNA sample could be. He wished the spit had been his.

It was clear that Seth was ready to bust a nut. Damian had no idea how to start a gay encounter, but he figured that going off-road, off the straight and narrow, might give him some ideas. He swerved onto the next exit ramp they came to and floored it out of the city.

The eight cylinders were behaving normally—kicking the dust into dirt devils, driving the cicadas into the windshield like soft bullets. Some insects probably committed suicide, but others had no choice when he pulled his horsepower under their ass. They flew by stick-thin trees strangled by weeds and kudzu, past muddy glades and cattail marshes. The air hung rank and thick. Even though the afternoon was fading into dusk, the heat was still brutal and he could hear Seth prying his pants off the leather seat. Cracking his knuckles, biting his nails.

“Let me give you a tip,” Damian said. “If it gets too heavy, think about your grandma taking her teeth out, or like, pinching a loaf. It’ll take your mind right off it.”

Seth mooned out the window.

“Never been to these whereabouts.”

“I’d be listening more than talking if I were you.”

He looked Seth up and down, trying not to view him as his own physical property, trying not to admire the incipient moustache that would sponge his nervous sweat when the test began. It’s hard not to feel like you own someone when you’re in charge of guiding them to their darker selves. But he knew that this was nothing more than a hazing ritual to make a man out of Seth, to pull stuff they could laugh about together, over a six-pack of Coors, when the bruises started to set.

They were there to take him as far away from Jehovah as an afternoon could.

“I’m going to show you something that would make a Miami Dolphins’ quarterback, like, fart a testicle. I’m going to take you to Armageddon and back.”

Seth’s chin quivered. A moment of truth. It was going to be a ceremony worth a tank of gas.

Damian swerved the car wildly back and forth, ripping through the sand on the edges of the road until it sprayed through the windows. Seth tried to fasten his seatbelt but Damian reached over and pried his sweaty hand off the buckle.

“Not in my car. Are you a man or are you a chickenshit? I’ll bet you a six-pack you won’t be a chickenshit once you know what the end of the world looks like.”

Fourth gear was ruthless. The smell of searing rubber, sublime.

The steering wheel spun like a Frisbee. The car felt like a derailing rollercoaster. Branches whip-lashed through the windows thwack-thwack-thwack, leaving tattered leaves in their laps. Seth looked like he was going to be sick out the window, but he stifled a surge of puke so that only traces of it dribbled out of the corners of his mouth. His fist was deformed into an arthritic clutch over Baby Smurf’s head.

“Dude pull over... I’m gonna sick on your car.”

“If you want to ride with us, you’ve got to have an iron gut.”

“Us?”

“Your new family.”

Damian slipped his hand between Seth’s legs and squeezed through his pants.

“You earn your place today and I’ll tell them that your balls are as big as grapefruits.”

Seth looked down at his crotch, at the fist gripping his nuts. It was good to know when someone was forging a life-long memory, when something was leaving a mental scar.

A brain tattoo that made it count.

That’s when Damian saw the outline of a vehicle bobbing towards them in a dust cloud up ahead. They got closer and he gunned for what could pass for the end of the world—the skeleton of an old farming tractor, hell bouncing on giant tires.

A horseman of the Apocalypse if he ever saw one.

“It’s not getting outta the way,” Seth said.

“Your faith is weak.”

Damian’s blood crystallized. The tractor hadn’t budged an inch. A forced breath, but the new oxygen only fed his panic. Think like a leader, he told himself, this isn’t your test.

He open-handed Seth on the chest, and held it there to feel if his heart was thumping fast enough to execute the move.

Damian smiled. Irregular thumps were best.

“What the fuck was that for?”

“To remind you that I’m the only way you have out. Loneliness is more dangerous than I am. It can kill you.”

Bearing down on the tractor, to the inevitable crush of steel and blood—Charles Bronson had to have been in this situation before.

Seth tried to scramble out the window but a dust cloud pushed him back in.

“This is for your own good!” Damian screamed above the roar.

He yanked the steering wheel to the right and Seth slammed into his ribs. Then something unusual happened, involving the car and the sky and gravity and magic. Whatever it was, it was just long enough.

For Seth to crumple into a ball with his hands clasped over his head.

For Damian to howl at the freedom that he always knew he could get from a car.

He didn’t know how long they had been motionless. A strange sound crept into the silence: blood trickling from Seth’s ear onto the tape deck control panel. The volume dial shone scarlet. His nose looked as bashed-in as the turbo scoop on the hood, or what he could see of it through the cicada guts and the web of cracks in the windshield. Beyond that, the edges of the car’s chrome fender hugged an oak tree. No sign of the mysterious horseman and his tractor.

Baby Smurf was wedged butt-first into the busted ventilation grill.

Was the sex going to be this violent, too?

Seth finally stirred, turning his head on the dash. The blood ran down his cheek and turned his blond sideburns orange. Sweat the color of cherry Kool-Aid balled at the tip of his nose and dripped to the floor.

“Yer bleeding,” Seth said. “There’s a whatchama-jigger stuck in.”

Damian stared at the shard of glass that was lodged in his hand like an arrowhead, painless and invisible until now.

“It’s nothing.”

“We almost died.”

“I know exactly how close we were,” Damian said, “and we were closer than almost. But the real truth is that we’ve just begun to live.”

Seth sank deep into his seat and had a heaving cry.

“Aw God... I’ve never seen this much... aw Jesus... my blood doesn’t even look like mine.”

Damian grabbed him by the back of the head and cradled him.

“It’s not good to cry on such an important day. Here, let’s wipe a bit of that blood off you... that’s quite the shiner you’ve got there.”

Seth’s black eye was a living bruise, shifting floridly under his skin, darkening from crimson to plum to eggplant.

“Don’t worry,” Damian said. “I can still see you in there.”

He squinted to see the change and got it—a wordless revelation, what could only be a look of trust. An unwavering second that showed they were now made of the same guts; intestinal kin. He had a sudden urge to finger the bruises in Seth’s chest. To match the fingerprints. To retrace the steps that turned him into a warrior.

“This needed to happen... eventually,” Seth said, looking down at Damian’s hand fitting into the abstract art on his chest. “I guess I wasn’t expecting you to trash yer car for me.”

The violent merger of chrome and oak, of glass and blood, had done something to them, had linked them in some strange way. This must be what it feels like to have a brother, Damian thought.

“I think you need a hug.”

He wrapped his arms around Seth. Something gooey like cookie dough melted inside him.

“Thanks,” Seth whispered into his ear.

A shiver frosted his cerebral cortex and went down to his tailbone. This was weird.

Hot breath, fragile pulses. Damian caught a whiff of the oily sebum in Seth’s hair, his indelible, personal scent. Magnetism. They kissed. Teeth clashed but it was okay. Feeding each other carbon dioxide, cheeks that swelled because somebody else blew into them, Damian’s bangs getting in the way. Emotion washed over and through him, cleansing, burning and healing at the same time. He would never need to believe in God or angels again—he simply had to believe that heaven could be a space, however breathless, between two human beings.

The sweat was so salty, it was like making out with a bag of potato chips. Damian pulled away before he crossed the line drawn clearly in his head between friendship and faggotry. You could’ve at least thought of a girl, you dumb fuck, a little voice told him.

He pressed play on the tape deck and turned the bloody volume dial, blasting the Ramones’ Stop Thinking About It.

Damian fetched the toothpaste from the glove compartment. The smell would help him think of Jody. He unzipped and squeezed a dollop of it onto his dick, wondering why it was already boned up.

“Go ahead, take a lick. Your breath kind of stinks, anyway.”

He was getting better at this sex thing. His own ballooning confidence was what kept him rock-hard.

Metallic electricity pulsed through his shaft, burning him coolly like only Aquafresh could. Minty froth bubbled down into his crack as Seth worked it. He told himself that this wasn’t really sex—he was simply being serviced by a hole. If he found any part of Seth attractive, if anything was responsible for his butt-clench, then it was probably masculine pride working itself out. Everybody knew that it was a natural turn-on to be surrounded by the virility of your own species. It was science.

If only he could remember what color Jody’s hair was.

Joey Ramone telling him to stop thinking about it.

Seth’s teeth were starting to irritate him so he pulled him up, stifling his moan of protest with a fake movie kiss.

Now he couldn’t even remember whether the bitch had piercings or not, but he could picture Zeke’s frenum front and center on the drive-in movie screen in his head.

Again Joey. How could he stop thinking about it with all these reminders?

He flattened Seth’s cheek into the rear-view mirror, pressing harder than he had to.

“Take a good look, because it’s the last time you’ll see Bible Boy.”

Pulling Seth’s zipper down.

“What the hell?”

‘Hell’ sounded like hail, the only pestilence this little Armageddon party of theirs was missing.

“Saving you.”

Damian jacked him off in rythym to the movements he made to squirm away. It was too late. The closer his balls turtled up to his body, the bigger his eyes bulged.

“Goddamn you, look what... yer making me do!”

His voice cracked as he spurted all over his tummy.

“There... doesn’t that feel better?”

Damian reached under his seat and brandished the tat gun. He cracked open the cartridge—a fountain pen swathed in duct tape—and topped it up with smurf-blue ink.

“Don’t worry. You’ve just been to Armageddon and back. Nothing can hurt you now.”

The gun clattered noisily in his hand as he guided it on a path of steady, loving violence over Seth’s arm. Stamping him with the day’s events, branding the changes deep into him. Giving him the skin he’d always known he belonged in, what he had to have endured a coon’s age of dogshit for.

The camcorder watched everything from the dashboard.

“But it hurts.”

“What won’t kill you will only make you stronger.”

While Damian was patiently finishing Soldier Smurf’s upper lip, determined to get the stiffness just right, the radio blared on. The tape began to play backwards, a belated demon of the crash. The tears came. His soaking, matted eyelashes suddenly felt too heavy to lift so he kept his eyes closed, tattooing blindly. The garbled sounds were nothing to cry over, but the memories they replayed were.

“That sounds like when I noticed the glass in yer hand,” Seth said, and went on another bawling jag.

They cried together.

Damian felt his loneliness spirit away with the heat that rose from the crumpled metal hood of the car. Someone finally understood. Someone besides him finally understood that the sad things in life were hopelessly beautiful, and that being sad made you gorgeous and real.

 

© 2006 Daniel Allen Cox - Contributor's Bio

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