Their two fleshes are bright together, the two boys, warm like the colors of the late sky. The sun still has some descending to do, and they watch it and the clouds for a while. Roy settles along the ground, spreading out his shirt, and Nathan does the same. Soon they are layered against each other. Roy says the movement of the treetops is like the ocean. Nathan knows nothing about the ocean; he listens to the murmuring of Roy's insides, the ferocious heartbeat that shakes through them both. Roy is murmuring in Nathan's ear, a hymn from church, "There is a place of quiet rest, near to the heart of God." Nathan sings too, kissing Roy's soft throat, his collarbones, the underside of his chin. He can smell Roy's body, he can taste it with the tip of his tongue. Roy grips the back of Nathan's head as if afraid he will escape. He need not worry. Nathan knows the nakedness Roy wants, and soon achieves it. Roy arches with his body toward Nathan, a curve of yearning. He lies bare in the grass with a look on his face as if Nathan is making him sing through every cell.
They he still while the sun settles into the green bath of leaves. Roy says nothing but Nathan can feel how his spirit darkens. The banded sky begins to drain of color as they dress. Roy stands with his hands in his pockets. He calls, "Nathan," in a strangled voice and Nathan walks close; he brings Nathan's ear to his mouth and says, "Please don't say anything about this to anybody. Okay? Please."
"I won't." For a moment, just a little, Nathan is afraid.
Roy has frozen with one leg in his pants, the other not.
"Is something wrong?"
"You just can't say anything about it. That's all." A bitter whiteness sheathing his expression. "It's near dark. We better get home."
But even then they linger in the forest. At first Roy holds Nathan's hand but later is ashamed or shy. Yet he refuses to hurry, walking slowly, never straying far. He brags that he knows all the land around his father's farm, he could find his way home in the pitch dark if he had to. Soon Nathan glimpses the cemetery through the trees, and then the pond, and they are walking along the tangled shore within sight of the backs of both houses. They slow their walking even more, and each reaches for ways to manage nearness to the other without seeming responsible for it. In back of the barn, Roy takes Nathan next to him, again furiously, as if the act makes him angry. "You can't do this with anybody but me. Do you hear what I'm telling you?"
Nathan's heart suddenly batters at them both. "I don't want to do it with anybody else."
"Just remember." Red-faced, Roy is already rushing toward his house.
Nathan wanders toward his own kitchen, hearing the sounds that indicate supper heading to the table. Already he is calculating the turns of the cycle, that tonight he will not see Roy, that tomorrow Roy will not say much on the bus. None of that makes him afraid, exactly. Nathan has no words for what does make him afraid. But he feels the chill of it as he descends into the house, where his mother has prepared a meal carefully but will hardly look him in the eye, where his father brings the Bible and a tumbler of whiskey to the dinner table, mumbling verses under his breath as he takes his seat. In the submersion of home, Nathan returns again and again to the image of Roy's body on the Indian mound, lost and bewildered under the power of Nathan's mouth.
Their guest for supper is Saint Paul, and the text is Romans, chapter one. Dad reads neither aloud nor silently, he chants softly as if he is alone, the words a stream of sound that barely rises above the gold edged pages of God's holy word. Because that, when they knew Cod, they glorified him not as Cod, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
The whiskey sits at his right hand, the knife and fork at the left. Today it is real whiskey bought from the local package store, not the clear moonshine of weekends and holidays.
Mom, restless, gives the appearance of hovering slightly above the seat of her chair. Neither listening nor speaking, she chews her food in a mechanical motion. As always at mealtime, she wears a frightened expression, glancing from Dad to Nathan, then fixing her attention on her plate.
Dad reads: Professing themselves wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and to four footed beasts, and creeping things.
Nathan eats though he can hardly taste. When he sits at the supper table with Mom and Dad, the twisting of his gut is unrelenting, and every soft spoken word from the King James Bible reverberates.
