how the white lilies grow
by skazka

how the white lilies grow

skazka

Summary

Peter lays traps, and is caught in them.

Notes

Content notes in endnote.

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 35855338.

Chapter 1

Phil studies the kid like he might some animal. His eyes had seen every sign of his passing, and tracked him to this place like you’d follow — the marks of his rubber-soled shoes in the dirt, the rubber toe-caps dragging as he’d shimmied under the bent willows, and then the naked heel-prints down the grassy slope when he had taken them off to carry them rather than let the white canvas get muddy. Sissy habits. It’d serve the interloper right, he’d thought, and it’d be a pleasure to surprise him here in this empty place and put fear into him. It’d give the boy some necessary respect for wild places. But there’s no chance of surprising him anyhow — the Gordon boy’s eyes are fixed on Phil’s from the first moment he steps out of the stand of willows.

He stands there in the water, narrow and straight and white as milk — in the sunlight his damp hair hangs darkened against his forehead, and the shadows of each rib can be counted. Turned to the side, the great narrowness of the boy is impossible to miss; the water drips down his back, and his nakedness is wholly uncovered.

“Wasn’t expecting you here, Pete, my boy.” Phil saunters down past the staging-ground of discarded garments, past the offensively white tennis shoes and their carefully folded cotton socks. The boyish notion is still there in his mind that it’d be funny to steal the kid’s clothes and watch him beg for their return, but looking at him now with his strange deerlike tranquility Phil isn’t so sure he would beg.

“Hello, Phil.”

The boy doesn’t turn away. He has a strange absence about him that can no longer be explained by simple stupidity, as if he were happily ignorant of how it was he looked and sounded to others — that animal quality that distinguished him was a kind of distance from his fellow human beings.

Back in New Haven, there were books’ worth of grisaille prints reproducing great works in marble — forbidding angels of uncertain sex and scenes from antiquity. Smooth-chested boys clutched flutes or teased unnaturally placid birds of prey that might as well have been stuffed— one supposed they were meant to be eagles but with none of the ferocity, and not the right shape anyhow. He’d made himself look at them in order to be certain of himself, and all they had elicited from him was a bellyful of hot contempt — that had satisfied him. Peter’s very smoothness and whiteness bring those scenes to mind — not their epicene figures but the absolute stillness of stone.

But those carved marble eyes had been devoid of all sight, and Peter’s queer eyes rest on him still. “What do you do here, all alone?”

“Why don’t you come here, and I’ll show you?”

How wonderful and terrible it is that Peter accepts it — his very compliance as he rises from the pond with the water lapping at his legs, the way he trots obligingly to the mud shore and stands there in the sun with water still beading on his skin. Phil circles him then, like a man sizing up an animal, and watches Peter’s gaze follow him. There’s knowledge in those eyes that’s as good as assent.

He could do anything he wanted with him here, a boy who looked like that — anything at all, and it’s the way of things that the weaker gives way to the stronger every time. This is what the kid’s mother’s so afraid of, whether she knows it or not. It figures that a woman knows what this looks like in a man, even if she won’t put words to it. A woman might see it but never understand it — not when it touches her own darling boy. It would serve her right to have her coddled son follow in her footsteps and find himself some fancy man, but Peter is so far above those things that even his tramp mother’s bad breeding can’t touch him.

He lays him down in the grass, drawing back to strip his own shirt open — he wants to feel him under his hands and to press skin against skin. The boy runs his fingers through the grass, letting his head drop back. If he’s curious about Phil’s own body, hard and unwashed, he’s too polite to show it.

“Now let’s look at you.”

His hands follow the soft development of muscles in the boy’s upper arms — that must be new, something he’s built up under Phil’s teaching, and the shy spread of color creeping down from beneath the suntan of his throat. The jut of his collarbone casts a little pool of shadow.

The raw skin of Phil’s palm rasps over the boy’s nipple, raising it to a stiff point. Peter watches with something like fascination as Phil surveys him like new country — charting him inch by wet inch with his hands. The slick mammal hairs on the backs of his arms, then, prickle beneath Phil’s touch, and his smooth belly quivering a little. The jut of his hipbones isn’t entirely to blame for the way the boy walks but seeing the architecture of bone so close to the skin provokes in him a clinical interest. And below that, below that thin demarcating crease—

Peter inclines his head and asks, “Would you like to kiss me?”

The catch of a lisp is in his voice, but there’s nothing comical in it now, and nothing worthy of scorn; it elicits a strange pity that pierces Phil like a needle.

With no answer Peter arches up to catch him anyway. His hands are still smooth between patches of new callus, and his touch is light, but he hangs himself around Phil’s neck like a woman and kisses him.

Once he’d come here fresh from school, fresh from the lecture hall with soft hands and a stiff collar biting at his neck — he’d been unformed and uncertain and Bronco Henry had reached out to take him up and give him shape. A young tree may be bent to a particular design, or grow in time around some foreign object: a chained-up bicycle or a tin sign. Any growing thing can be trained up to keep a certain shape.

The kid tastes like pond water. Rubbing at his mouth afterward with the back of his hand, Phil manages, “I suppose I could.”

Kissing is another thing he sets himself to mastering — it deserves to be done with discipline, for all that he wants to sink his teeth in and tear Peter to pieces. He catches him with his mouth and means to make him yield, but Peter’s tongue flits back into his mouth like an intruder. Phil fixes him hard and bites his bottom lip to make Peter gasp.

“You’d better be serious about this. I’m not the kind of fellow to be played with.”

“It’s all right with me if it’s all right with you.” He looks terribly serious even with his bitten lip and dripping hair, as if he were assenting to the amputation of a finger or a toe, and that pricks at Phil’s pride.

“Well, isn’t that generous of you.”

He bends him back pliantly, drawing up his knee with a hand in the soft crook of the joint, and lays the split of him bare — his balls drawn up plump and reddened, his soft prick cleaving to his belly. There’s a pale brown birthmark at the top of his left thigh, where the skin makes a crease, and Phil makes a note of that for later — wouldn’t it be a pleasure to walk up to Rose Gordon at that tuneless piano and tell her, I’ve seen every part of your boy, and he let me. Your boy’s got a birthmark shaped like a man’s thumbprint and you and I both know exactly where it is — I’ve left more fingerprints than that on him…

He wets his fingers in his mouth and sets to work easing inside him, feeling his breath quicken as the muscles of him twitch and jerk against Phil’s hand. Phil can’t resist hurting him a little, to see what he’ll do about it — whether he’ll accept it with dull patience or else resist him. His work-rough fingers fit inside him to the last knuckle, making the boy yelp against a balled-up fist, and the response each jabbing thrust elicits from the boy’s prick is satisfyingly plain. He wants him, there’s no dissembling around that. That part of a man won’t lie.

Phil fumbles himself loose from the fly of his Levis. His cock is plenty hard already and he’d like nothing more than to sink it in something warm and tight — to fit himself to Peter’s body, to cover him and fill him. He brings himself in line for the first thrust, but the first brush of his wet cock-head against that pretty pink asshole makes Peter squirm with apprehension beneath him.

“Don’t,” Peter says against his mouth. “Please don’t. Not yet.” What refusal could be sweeter?

There’s a season for everything, and it’s reasonable enough not to want to be fucked all but dry there on the bare ground where any damn fool might blunder in and see it. He kisses him until his mouth aches, until his whiskers have scratched Peter’s smooth cheeks raw and the boy’s surprised mouth is scarlet. He drives himself into such a state of frenzy that he can’t stand it, and has to roll off of him for a while, to lie there breathless in the bruised grass and make use of his hand.

There in the sunlight and the air and the open he finishes himself off, running down the edge of that desire until it yields to him. No image, no relic, no recollection there to carry him away — only the memory of a man who had once been good to him. Bronco Henry’s handkerchief knots around his hand like a pledge, and Phil lets himself close his eyes.

Once this had been sacred ground, one of those spots consecrated to the wildness of boyhood — he’d have regarded an interloper in this place like an assault on everything in which he found value.

Peter lies quietly next to him, with his hands folded across his hollow belly. In the sunlight, the boy’s pale eyelashes are casting spider-shadows on his cheeks.

“What was it like, going to Yale?” Peter asks him.

“Nothing you ought to be jealous of. Nation’s greatest collection of stuffed shirts.”

“Were you unhappy there?”

“How about you stop asking such stupid questions?”

Why’d you come here, he wants to ask him, but the answer is certain and it gives him an awful little swell of pride — to be like Phil, and in order that Phil might find him.

Peter had hoped to find him here, too. He’d meant to lure him out into this lonely place. Why else go out from the big house, with its enameled tub carried all the way from Boston and its catalog soaps, and take all the trouble?

Phil sits back and watches him dress himself, watches the boy’s spidery fingers do up the buttons of his shirt cuffs and tug up his white cotton socks — piece by piece he assembles himself into a starched and gawky figure, thin as a child’s drawing. When he straightens up from tying his shoelaces, his face creases in a momentary flinch of pain that’s difficult to mistake. For all that Phil hadn’t even fucked him, he’ll be sitting more gingerly now. He’ll have that sweet private agony to remember him by.

“Better stay out of the saddle for a day or two, Pete, m’boy. Take it easy on the old backside.”

The kid blushes to the tips of his ears, and Phil can’t help laughing at him, till he hurries away.

He hangs back a while after that, figuring for enough time for Peter to walk back to the house or wherever it was he’d been planning to go after that. He washes his face and hair and hands, and he wipes the spunk from his belly with that old blue handkerchief, but he doesn’t bother with anything else. Let the stink of their coupling stay on him — the high sharp smell of the boy’s own desire for him, still clinging to Phil’s shirt.

*

They carry on for a little while like that — Peter stealing out to the barn to watch him tend to his horse, after the cowhands have retired to enjoy their small leisure and sweat over their letter-writing and listen to their phonograph records. Peter will let him steal a kiss there against a wall or allow his fine-boned ankle to graze against the calf of Phil’s leg.

The cowhands are silent when he passes now, sensing that the kid now falls within Phil’s scope. Peter gives him such tokens of his esteem and in return, Phil teaches him the things a man his age ought to know — how to hold himself in the saddle so the motion of the horse doesn’t jostle the teeth right out of his head and leave him sore, how to soak those crisp new Levis so the dye runs clean and doesn’t sweat against his legs.

Phil teaches him to work in wood, and the boy’s clever fingers show a particular aptitude in that area — better to fashion useful things with a little beauty to them than to spend time in the creation of paper flowers. If he’d had any kind of a father at all he ought to know these things already, but as it is he’s a quick study and Phil takes private pleasure seeing his fumbling false starts grow more steady and sure with every repetition. A man like Johnny Gordon couldn’t teach a boy anything worth knowing; he’d left him to the care of his mother and look where that had gotten him, for Christ’s sake. Pearly scrubbed fingernails, and paper flowers, and a lisp. What can a woman teach a man? No, if Johnny Gordon had been a better father he’d have gotten himself a better son.

All the while, in Peter’s glances Phil sees an invitation. The boy has taken to wearing his boots in all weather, and he dogs Phil’s heels like a shadow. It hurts his mother terribly, of course, which just makes Phil enjoy it more.

Phil will ask him, as they ride together, “What do they teach in school these days? I want to know just what my brother’s good money is buying.” And Peter will tell him about his studies, anatomy and pharmacology and the winnowing away of superstition, and how he looks forward to the study of pathology, and all the instruction his home laboratory is not able to provide.

Peter shares with him an epigram once, something about the road to Hades running straight, and his desire to please is so palpable it would take a heart of stone not to tease him. Phil pauses a while as if in deep thought, and offers: “Your Greek is better than your old man’s, that’s for sure.”

Peter looks at him with those strange eyes and takes the compliment as it was given.

*

The house is quieter at night, but it’s a pained sort of quiet, one even the men out cutting hay and minding cattle are capable of noticing. Having accomplished the aim of weaning the kid off his mother, there wasn’t much else to do but enjoy the proceeds of that, and the woman’s absence (shut up in what had once been the Old Lady’s bedroom, a prison not to be wished on anybody) was less odious than having to listen to her slur her words and fumble with the silverware. Victory doesn’t need to announce itself with flags a-waving and a brass band — Peter is his now, and it’s only a matter of time before the little woman concedes her defeat.

So when George sits him down at the supper table and says he’s found his wife a place, Phil can hardly contain his satisfaction. He has to master himself to keep his face staunchly expressionless, when inside he’s ready to whoop with vicious laughter.

“What sort of a place?” The nearest indigent women’s refuge can’t be any closer than Jordan. Or he supposes he might mean a whorehouse, if he means for her to earn her keep. “Some love nest in Herndon, I bet.”

George looks at him with big dull eyes, a wounded animal’s eyes. “I mean a hospital, Phil.”

He was going to put the old girl away at last — one hundred pounds of trouble, though looking more like ninety these days with everything she ate coming out of a glass bottle. If George had to have a wife, let him keep her far away from here, far away from the house the old folks had built and far from anything over which Phil held dominion.

Phil folds his arms and pushes his chair back from the supper table. It pleases him to hear the grating wood.

“If that’s the best place for her, then, hell.”

Look at Fatso, red-faced. “I’ll be going with her. It’s just for a season, Phil, just for the summer, someplace the air is better.”

“Suit yourself.”

Sticking pins in George isn’t much fun any more. He stays up all night playing his banjo, waiting for the kid to respond to the summons and come to him, but Peter never does — and if he can hear the woman bawling in the other room then he doesn’t care.

In the end it wasn’t so grim an institution as Phil might have hoped for — the place had no right to be called a hospital, but it boasts of mineral springs and immaculate screened porches and all the amenities wealth and ill-health could ask for. There the little lady could complain of her imagined headaches as much as she pleased and not bother anyone. It never was too clear just how George had learned of the place — it didn’t seem like the kind of institution to advertise in the periodicals his brother preferred. Hell, maybe the little lady had recommended it herself, and the whole tragicomic story of booze and Indians and beaded gloves had been a smokescreen to net herself softer accommodations than a drafty old house with nothing much to offer in the way of laughs. Phil wanted to laugh, of course, but the knowledge that she was taking his business partner with her rankled him badly and rankles him still.

It wasn’t that they couldn’t spare George for a season, or that Phil was unqualified to run the place himself single-handed, but something else — and it’s something else that eats at him like a cancer in the belly.

On the day George and his wife are due to depart, Phil takes off to the mountains, just a camping trip all by his lonesome. He can’t bear the sound of the Reo jouncing off with all that woman’s luggage loaded up in it, all those unnecessary things that George like a fool had provided her — as if she were a virgin bride freshly arrived from New England without her trousseau and not a suicide widow that God knew how many men had lain on top of in their time. Take her all the way to Colorado and leave her there for good, put her away and throw away the key.

To amuse himself Phil sets about making snares — that’s one decent thing Peter knows that Phil won’t have to teach him, the kid’s got all sorts of traps set around the place and his mother used to scream bloody murder over whatever he’d catch. Imagine wanting a doctor for a son and balking at the sight of a little blood.

Peter will be going away too before long — back to the laboratory and the lecture hall, back to stuffed-shirt college boys and dull plodding creatures who came because of an advertisement in the magazines that said there was easy money for a small-town doctor.

If Peter were here he’d show him a thing or two — but then his thoughts turn unsettled to all the things he had learned there under Bronco Henry’s tutelage, all the things his brother had been too slow to share.

These were things that had been offered but never understood — and George had withdrawn from them as he withdrew from anything that eluded him. It had been Phil who was chosen in the end, though they both felt the benefit of Bronco Henry’s work — the man had seen Phil rightly, not just what he was but what he could be. Thank Christ he never saw him like this, or he’d tan his hide just for being so stupid.

The man had his own ways, and his own particularities — there were things they’d done together that he’d never even heard of before, not in the most expressively vulgar company. There were things Bronco Henry had done to him that must have been the next best thing to witchcraft, and he’ll never know those pleasures and pains again.

Phil tosses the half-made snares on the fire. Up there in the mountains, watching a hawk wheeling overhead, he is lost to his bitterness. Hang the little bitch and hang George too if he cares so much about her delicate constitution.

*

When Phil returns from the mountain Peter’s there by the garage, as if just come from putting away the old Reo — the boy drops his rag and flies up the slope to greet him.

He stops just short of embracing him, straightening up with a hand pressed to the small of his back, and for the first time in many days, Phil cracks a smile that is nearly without malice.

Peter’s been reading about car maintenance and repair, he says — this is a topic to which Phil scorns to turn his interest, and for Phil to learn it would infringe on his brother’s patch of territory, one of the few places where George’s steady incuriousness sparked into something else. It would be a betrayal of George, and a betrayal too of Bronco Henry, a man who never had to concern himself with such things. But somebody has to do it, and if it gets Peter’s sweet hands dirty and leaves him smelling like paraffin and grease, it’ll do him good.

What need do they have of George anyway when Peter is young and bright and hungry to learn — Phil will make a bookkeeper of him yet. He’ll never be any good with the men, of course, but Phil can bite his tongue and take up the slack there of talking business and figures and so many head of cattle. Frankly, he’s glad in some absurd way that the woman hadn’t taken Peter with them to Colorado. No healthy boy would have enjoyed such a place, set up as it was to suit worn-out old drunks and nervous wives.

That night, they bed down together in the barn, with the horses. Bronco Henry’s saddle is there with them like some presiding household god, and Phil is so sorry and heartsick that he does all sorts of things he’d never do.

Peter slides into his lap, stripped down to a white cotton undershirt and his Levis with the buttons Phil loves to undo; there’s muscle there in his skinny arms that wasn’t there before, and the soft demarcation of a summer suntan. The weight of his body is still feather-light, and his hips fit flush against him; he takes Phil’s face between his hands like a pagan priest giving a blessing.

“I want you to teach me to shoot,” the kid says. Phil makes a coarse joke and pulls him in tighter.

He ought to be ashamed, sporting with him like this, pulling down the collar of his undershirt so he can bite the soft place there in his shoulder and make him shiver. He draws wine-red bruises from that soft white skin with the supreme confidence that the marks will never be seen, and that no one who did see them could ever guess where they came from. Only Peter will know, and Peter will carry that memory with him like a hot coal until the day he dies.

The feel of him is so much that Phil can hardly stand it —Peter rubbing against him shamelessly, getting him so hot and agitated that he can feel the flush of blood rising up from below his collar. He teases him too, softly saying the sort of things no man should say to another, things no one should overhear.

Peter rides against his lap, and Phil takes both their pricks in his hand, bringing them together in a wet press of friction. They cleave together like that like it’s the most natural thing in the world — Peter’s eager instead of grudging and Phil can’t keep his hands off of him.

This is what he’s been missing and not known it. After he’s come, Peter sucks the spunk from off his fingers, lapping at him like a cat. If it’s obscene he can’t give a damn — Peter sucking on his rough raw thumb, looking down at him with those big and haunted eyes fringed with their funny pale lashes.

In the morning they disentangle themselves and make themselves decent. Phil unbars the door.

If he still feels the absence of his brother, lingering with him like a missing tooth, then he has plenty of work to occupy himself: the tail-end of the haying season, with all the oversight and scrutiny that entails, and in his private hours the braiding of rawhide.

*

“I like it here,” Peter says. “With you. It’s quieter.”

Quiet in the house, sure, with only Mrs. Lewis and the girl Lola puttering around, but the sounds of male laughter drifting up from the bunkhouses and the sounds of beasts, impatient cattle and dogs at play. It could be damn close to paradise, that way, and every closed door in the house was like a bulkhead holding back the memory of what had happened there. They spend Saturdays together almost exclusively, and in the bathroom with its enamel tub and chypre-smelling soaps Peter cuts Phil’s thick dark hair for him, as careful as any barber.

When he sinks down onto his knees to run his plastic comb through Phil’s hair, Phil takes him by the elbow and says, “You’re glad to be rid of your mother, ain’t you?”

Instead of an answer, Peter kisses him on the mouth.

The days are growing shorter now and the urgency he feels in making a man out of the kid leaves him irritable and frantic. The fellows of the bunkhouse seldom see him any more, and his absences kick loose more disarray — his absences at breakfast, and the discontent of certain men who see better things to do than spend time with Miss Nancy.

The pattern and the plan of it is slipping away from him. That date is coming soon, the end of the season and the promise of George’s return — and only a few last nights of peace, to be enjoyed with the relative privacy afforded to the very wealthy and the very rude. He’ll make them worth remembering.

Phil decides on the biggest bed in the house — it had been the Old Gent’s once and the room still carried his presence in it, like the faintest ghost. After the last time they’d quarreled, the old man had walled himself up in there just to avoid the sight of his son’s face — and that was the kind of man Mr. Burbank was, who could say such things to a man but not look him in the eye after, frightened of himself for putting a name to something that could never be spoken and frightened of Phil for not flinching when that name was said.

Bringing the boy here was petty revenge on old pater, for sure, but it was something else too. The Old Gent’s room is the heart of the house, stiff and red — he’d lugged the furniture with him all the way from Boston, the rugs and the mirrors. They make love there on the white cotton dust-covers, Phil in his full glory still filthy from the saddle. It ought to be everything, and it isn’t.

“I ought to keep you with me,” he says in the aftermath, and it makes Peter flinch. “I figure you’ve learned just about all you need to know for doctoring in town, but you still can’t ride worth a damn. I’ll teach you shooting, like I promised.

“That’d be nice, but I promised — I promised someone I’d come back to school.”

“Oh? And who’s that?” Unguarded and surprised, Phil’s tone is mocking. Who could it possibly be? Not his mother, who couldn’t know much about her son’s studies to begin with, and not his suicide father. There’s no one in the world who cares whether Peter Gordon lives or dies except Phil himself. It’s a pretty way of playing coy.

Phil watches Peter swallow, as the sharp corner of his Adam’s apple jumps in his throat. There’s a faint blue vein at the corner of his temple, and he can see it throb.

“I have a friend,” Peter says stiffly, and that’s all. Some other person, better-beloved. Not a lover but a friend.

Afterward Peter’s silence aches like a bruise. Some spell is broken. They lie together there on the bed until Phil is almost drowsing, swimming in the hateful fatigue that envelops him now whenever he’s shot his load and is left with nothing but an old man’s melancholy.

Nothing satisfies, nothing endures. He’d done things for Bronco Henry that Peter would never do, or not yet — Phil had taken his prick to the root, until he choked, and Bronco Henry’s palm had pressed flush to the side of his throat where the pulse sat, feeling him strain to take him. He’d done it for him because he’d wanted to, because the anticipation of it made him hard and the recollection of it was impossibly sweet — knowing the taste of a man, the smell of him, the slip of his skin. It had been those hands on the back of Phil’s neck, pressing through Phil’s hair where it’d grown long against the nape. It had been all those things and others besides.

Peter’s hand presses past his waistband, slipping between his body and the bed. Twenty years he’s worn that handkerchief next to his skin, closer than anyone ever wore a love token. Peter wraps it around the knuckles of his hand, like a glove.

“You must have loved him very much.”

“Yeah.” Phil turns his head and catches sight of himself in the mirror. His own face is hateful to him — the hard raw bones there under the skin. Peter holds him there against the bed — his funny head resting against Phil’s side, and his arm thrown around him like a brother.

*

The morning after that is a Saturday, and Phil returns to Peter’s room before the sun is up. The walls and floor are familiar, but the contents are as alien to his tastes as walking on the moon.

On the bookshelves the heavy black books of medicine, inert as lead, as if the imposing figure they cut on the shelf would make up for the deficiencies in the intellect of their original owner. It wasn’t the quality of care that had folks in town talking about how they missed the old doctor — people liked Dr. Gordon because he never thought to charge for his services, and they never had to pay. The quality of the services scarcely mattered, kill or cure, so long as they came free. Peter had been better off without him. There were newer books too, medical journals, and glass slides by the box, clustered around the microscope that George must have bought him. George found pleasure in anything with lenses, and he had a vested interest in buying the boy’s affection with this or that just as he’d bought his wife. But Peter is Phil’s boy only, and his boots stand at the bedside.

A few old books of poetry, and an album — Rose’s things, must be, left behind, and worth a laugh. But inside the cover a small precise hand has written, This is Peter Gordon’s book, and some careful person has trimmed out and pasted in a spray of roses from a Christmas card. Roses in the winter. It’d make you sick if it didn’t show such queer clarity of vision, page by page. Men and women, automobiles, animals — figures cut from old postcards, steamships and ballrooms. It’s a book of clippings as sentimental as any of the young fellows in the bunkhouse with their moving picture magazines and their letters to mother.

These were all the things he sought to pry the boy away from — indoor pursuits cut out for seminary girls or sick old women, limping poetry and watercolors and precious penmanship. Pete had left this stuff behind him, all right, and the sight of such things arranged in so maidenly a fashion was comical. One page after another, until the last — a scatter of broken flower petals and a photograph from some periodical showing a wide white avenue and long screened porches. The caption bears a familiar name.

George didn’t know anything about these places, whatever they called themselves — hospitals or resorts or sanatoriums, these were playgrounds for rich weaklings with nothing to boast of but money. The Burbanks had never given a damn before about doctors or medicine; they’d never had to before the woman came along. For the first time, the design of it shows clear and complete.

The boy is asleep where Phil left him. Phil creeps over with his lightest footsteps and kneels beside him on the mattress. The advantages of size and weight are both his, and his weight against the boy’s legs is enough to keep him there.

“You must think you’re pretty clever,” Phil says, “finding that place in Colorado.” He doesn’t raise his voice — doesn’t need to, and his hand finds the base of the boy’s throat, where the dip of his collarbone forms a notch.

Peter’s eyes are open, there in the dark. “I read about it in a journal. They say it’s the best.”

“Only the best for the little lady. You know she sold her tail to buy those books of yours, don’t you? What she’s got isn’t a marriage. Brother George is renting her.”

“Your brother’s a good man.”

“He’s useless and he’s soft, and he doesn’t know enough to tell when he’s being taken for a ride. I let him into town and he falls right into the first pit he sees. How’d you get him to go with her, Pete?”

“I wanted to be alone with you. I wanted to learn.”

The boy tries to sit up, but Phil catches him against the headboard.

“Bullshit. You wanted to keep a good thing going, that’s all, set your maw up someplace nice and soft while you figured out the purse-strings. What’d you tell him?”

“She has headaches; that’s why she drinks.” Peter’s voice is sullen and small and Phil tightens his grip.

“Boy, are you two ever stupid. She drinks ‘cause she likes it, and because it suits her. Why didn’t you ever say something?”

“George went because he can’t stand you any more. You call his wife a drunk and a whore.”

He can’t know what George feels — George doesn’t feel anything, he’s got less sense than an animal, all his life he’s looked to Phil to tell him just what to do. Giving up George — giving him up to that woman, who could never deserve him, just for a little white slip of a sissy who cuts up rabbits and gophers and Christ knows what else. He wants to shake him until that narrow neck of his snaps. He wants to beat him bloody.

Phil smiles, showing teeth. “That’s right. And you’ll skip off to school in the end, happy as can be. You’re nothing but a little whore yourself, Pete.”

“I want to be alone with you, Phil. It’s better to be alone with you than watching you treat people badly.”

“Is that what this is? You sure picked some trick.” Bold to think that Phil wouldn’t cut him out outright — that he wouldn’t tire of him, or that the tide would not turn again and sicken him on the boy’s stiff effeminacy. “You think you’ve got me figured.”

He could kill him like this, easy. The thought’s occurred to him before in odd moments of pleasure and now in earnest he knows how true it is — how easy it would be.

Peter asks, “What did you say to your father that made him leave?”

The question brings a surge of incandescent pain, but it leaves his body curiously still. His voice comes thick with hate. “Why, he told me he’d known I wasn’t right for a long time now. Said he was sorry for it, thought he’d been the one to blame for letting a man like that get at me. I didn’t want the old bastard taking responsibility. I only told him the truth.”

There’s a savage relief in knowing that Peter doesn’t know the old man and doesn’t love him, can scarcely even have met him. He desecrates his bed and makes the house he built a Sodom all because Phil told him to. Bronco Henry is realer to him than a living man.

After a silence, Peter says: “Then it’s just the two of us now.” There is a strange understanding in it: Peter’s hand finds its way to the front of Phil’s shirt, to rest where one imagines the heart sits inside the cavity of the chest. What he means is: You have me.

Phil lets his grip go slack, and lets his hand fall to the bedclothes. “I guess it is.”

In that they're well-matched. He'll take him up to the mountains and show Peter what had once been shown to him.

End Notes

Content notes: canon-typical sexism, homophobia, and addiction; consent issues; mutual manipulation; slut-shaming; some physical violence.

First of all, recip, I cannot thank you enough for introducing me to this book and now its film adaptation -- it's truly gorgeous and heady and full of the most intense emotions. I ended up on the wildest journey writing this and I want to thank you for how great every one of your prompts is. Happy Yuletide.