Lancaster County 15/17 An Old Silver Revolver and Razed Fields
O1. Shakespearean Violence
O2. Count the Freckles
O3. Over-privileged
O4. Common Sense
O5. The Brightness of Alcohol
O6. I Am the Message
O7. Independence Day
O8. Not So Goddamned Nice
O9. When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain, Pt. 1
1O. When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain, Pt. 2
11. Friendship and Something
12. Undercurrent
13. Folkin' Around
14. Now from the After
15. An Old Silver Revolver and Razed Fields
Dick dreams that Nixon is lying dead beside him, and his sister is wearing a white ceramic dress with painted blue flowers at the foot of the bed-the same pattern as his mother’s china. He wakes with a start in the place between dark and sunrise. He instinctively nudges the body next to him to see where the truth really lies. The back-story of his dream and the information of now are still tangled and Dick tries not to jump to conclusions until the lines are completely uncrossed. Not even the slow swell of Nixon’s chest pressed against his own convinces him fully-Dick waits until Nix lets out a sleepy order to stop fidgeting to accept it. Then he lets out a sigh and lets his head fall to the pillow again.
In the dream, Nixon had been clutching two things in his hands, curled up like a child against him. In one hand a toy pistol-an old silver revolver that Dick hoped would only click harmlessly-and the other a book bound on all four sides. He’d known through that murky dream logic that Nixon had been dead exactly two days, and in another day they were going to bury him, whether Dick had let go or not.
And Ann, in a low singsong voice, repeating, “Never goddamn nervous. You aren’t nice. That’s the first step.”
He chuckles in the quiet of his room, noticing that Nixon has somehow managed to take all the covers without really untangling himself from Dick.
He lifts his hand to move Lew’s dark hair off his forehead. The response is another wordless mumble and Nixon kicking absently in his sleep. He can only hope the dreaming is better on his side of the bed. Dick then closes his eyes and just lets himself separate from thought for a few more hours. Otherwise he’ll remember that sunrise brings the last day of August and when September rolls in there’s no guarantee Nixon will still be there. And Nixon will be upset enough for the both of them, he knows.
Dick expects the half-avoidant smirk, the extra carelessness in his gait, even the cynic edge to all his words as they toss a ball behind the house the next morning after breakfast. He can appreciate Nixon’s sometimes bratish responses to pain and duress probably spring from a very opulent but very unfulfilled life, even though they disappoint and grieve him all at once. Dick can’t pretend to know the depths of crimes his own blood has committed against him, but when he watches Nixon watch his mother approach, he doesn’t expect the cold, almost disgusted fury in his expression. With a carefully drawn brow, Dick catches the ball Nix had tossed the moment before in his father’s slightly oversized glove, then looks over his shoulder.
The polished Ford jumps down the tracks in the dusty driveway with a purpose. Nixon scoffs behind him, laughing a little only out of derision. Dick doesn’t turn around, but he hears it, loud and clear and heavy on him. “Found me.”
He doesn’t turn, tries not to encourage the bitterness in his voice. “Your mother was probably just worried about you. You didn’t exactly try hard to inform her where you went for the night.”
“It’s something of a family tradition not to tell each other absolutely anything,” Nixon says. He punches the palm of Dick’s glove absently. “I guarantee you she’s not stopping in for lemonade.”
Dick presses his lips together in uncertainty. He can’t stop noticing the sharp edge of fear in Nixon’s smallest motions. When he does open his mouth, Nixon shakes his head and cuts him off. “No, I can go myself, it’ll be fine,” he says. “I’m a big boy-I tie my shoes and everything.” Without looking at him, he hands Dick his glove and walks past, headed across the lawn to the mouth of the driveway, where his mother is stepping out of the car in a pair of heels.
She stands and waits for him, as cold as her clothes are tailored.
“Nix-”
“Just be a minute. Keep it warm for me,” he answers with a wave of his hand.
Dick also doesn’t expect the almost lifeless way Nixon stands in front of his mother while she talks-ostensibly upset about her son running off to “god-knew where” for a night. Despite the distance, Dick sees his normal, undimmed spark of honesty-sometimes crude and challenging and sometimes wounded-shift to hide behind something. He nods to whatever she says with a short, anxious motion. Having gotten her apology, she climbs back into the car, reminds him pointedly of something once more, and drives off.
Nixon makes the journey back more quickly, rolling his eyes all the while over a string of muttered curses. Dick gives him a small smile in the hopes it’ll remedy something-not a smile fueled by joy but worry. Nixon doesn’t look up to see it, even when he walks straight past.
There’s a familiar clatter of the white-painted screen door swinging shut that draws Dick’s attention for a moment, allowing Nixon to gain ground as he trudges unhappily off. To where, Dick can only guess-but he turns to look instead at the front of the house. His mother is there, squinting in the sun after the brand new Ford leaving the drive. Straight from the kitchen sink, now watching the dust settle in the car’s wake.
She’s drying her hands on her apron when she looks at him in return. The distance prevents him from seeing her expression clearly, but after a moment of mutual consideration, Dick turns to follow Nixon and she watches him go without a word.
He’s not surprised Nixon’s always carrying some sort of intoxicant with him these days. He’s just surprised to see how much cigarette is burnt away by the time Dick catches up. He’s fled to the slightly overgrown part behind the barn sheltered by a few trees, head bowed the whole way. Apparently unnoticed by all other parties, Dick believes he’s known Nixon long enough and deep enough to see the internal shift in him these late summer days. Barely curtailed desperation moves his hand whenever he touches, whether it is to tap his carton of cigarettes loose, to rub the sweat from his brow, or to pull Dick by his forearm close enough to bury his face away from something in his shoulder.
He does his best to act unconcerned whenever he can, but Dick’s there most of the time and he always ends up slipping up once or twice.
Nixon settles his back against the barn and eases himself down until he’s sitting, legs lying crookedly out in front of him.
“What did she want?” Dick asks, when a minute passes and only the orange tip of his cigarette moves.
“Every first-born son of Israel,” Nixon says angrily.
“Well,” comes the half-tired answer, “we’re both in the same boat, then.” Dick decides that baseball and the rest of the day is going to have to wait a while-for at least one more cigarette, if he’s feeling saintly enough to let it go-and sits down beside Nix behind the barn. “Or maybe just a basket set adrift in the reeds.”
He even gets a little delayed laughter at his answer after a few minutes. Nixon’s mind seems to be coming slowly around from wherever it had gone and eventually appreciates his reference. His muted laugh transfers across from where they touch-elbows, knees, shoulders-the benign and brotherly places during the day. They’ll find the needful places when they feel a little safer and make sure whatever they can’t say is understood.
Nixon finally pulls the cigarette from his mouth and gives a long, smoky exhale. “She wants me to go back when I’m done saying goodbye,” he answers. But he takes another generous drag before he continues, and Dick waits.
He hangs his head and motions vaguely with his free hand. “Whenever that will be… Pack up, head home, you know. School’s due to start soon.”
“That boring, productive place.” Dick smiles. “It’ll miss you if you don’t go.”
The scoff is marked by a thick puff of blue-tinged white smoke. “Not as much as I won’t miss it.”
Dick watches his toes with a faint smile, tapping them absently in the air. “I’d offer you a place to stay here, but the barn stalls are all full.” But no real smile can he yet wrangle from Nixon, just the automatic twitch of his lips around the cigarette.
He stares into an unknowable distance, somewhere else and sitting there behind the barn at the same time. “Tomorrow-Goddamn, has it already been three months?”
“That’s all the longer summer is, Nix,” Dick points out calmly.
“Yeah, well, summer in Havana goes all fuckin’ year long.”
He’s unable to keep his unhappiness neatly boxed and housed in storage miles away from him. He can’t just fold it up and put it away whenever his parents and societal niceties demand it of him, and he can’t do it now. Especially not now.
Not when Dick’s looking so evenly at him, never judging, only watching and listening. He hates wondering if it’s only when he looks Dick in the eye it’ll feel like putting his feet up and finally getting a deep breath.
Nixon chooses to turn away and look out across the yard, nervously tearing a piece of long grass.
“I’ll miss you,” Dick says a few minutes later. Nix closes his eyes and pushes back against the force of something pushing out from his chest and the back of his eyes. He’s not sure if he hears, “too,” in there or only wants to hear it. It’s so quiet and simple a statement it makes his sigh an overwhelming noise.
He doesn’t have the nerve to answer him because he knows he’ll embarrass himself if he opens his mouth. So, eyes still barred shut against the world and against himself, he leans across the gap and rests his head on Dick’s shoulder behind the barn.
“You never unpacked, did you?”
“Not really.”
Dick smirks and runs a few reverent fingertips along Nixon’s wrist where the veins beat. “All the more time to say goodbye.”
Lewis strolls back home so near to the beginning of the next day he thinks it’s hardly worth the effort of crawling into bed only to be roused in a few hours by the help. His mother would be furious with him, no doubt-she’d trill about how traumatic it’d been to not know where he’d been. But only as soon as she got all her beauty sleep. Nixon wished, grinning a Cheshire cat’s grin, she were awake and standing at the door and asking where he’d gone just to tell her that he’d been fucking another boy in the ripened corn fields. To see her reaction through an endorphin-laced filter would be especially priceless.
Instead, he settles for smiling in a daze as he lumbers up the stairs and wonders how Dick’s doing as he walks back homes. Will his father be pacing the floors in a disappointed scorn when he arrives? Will his mother join him there, or will she be awaiting him alone at the door with that smile-that all-knowing, quiet glow Dick has inherited-and a moderate punishment? They’d fallen asleep for a few hours after midnight in the fields before finally heading separate directions in the dark. Consequences were a mutual overwrite-they’d accept whatever punishment came their way. Not that they’d thought about anything like that while trying to say a proper goodbye.
Nixon remembers trying to smooth the pink imprints of corn stalks and leaves out of Dick’s skin. He kicks off his shoes as he makes it up the stairs, and one clatters down a few steps in his carelessness. He pushes his door open, and there’s a square of moonlight on his stack of hardly-touched luggage in the corner.
He falls bonelessly onto his bed and remembers the way Dick loved to rake his fingers across Nixon’s navel and moan against his skin where his neck met his shoulder. He remembers Dick leading him to an old water stream now overgrown with grass, in the middle of the neighboring fields of ripe feeder corn. He remembers trying to remove the silk of a corncob for their dinner, and eventually handing it over to the more experienced party. He remembers it sensation by sensation until it’s dreaming.
Then Dick is kneeling in a razed field, cradling a bridled horse by the bit, kneeling and pressing his forehead to it’s own in a deeply reverent and pained gesture. Its skin is pale buckskin, and its hair dark, dark-lying with half of its body raised off weakly the ground. Nixon goes to him and counts the freckles on his bare back. He’s using Dick’s shoulder blade to rest his head when he wakes and tries to say, “1,481,” before it all becomes his mother’s feet thundering across the floor.
“Where were you?” she barks immediately, pulling the pillow from his arms.
Nixon smiles sleepily. “Lancaster County,” he answers, as if summer had all been a dream, and he laughs like it’s just the funniest thing ever said.
O2. Count the Freckles
O3. Over-privileged
O4. Common Sense
O5. The Brightness of Alcohol
O6. I Am the Message
O7. Independence Day
O8. Not So Goddamned Nice
O9. When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain, Pt. 1
1O. When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain, Pt. 2
11. Friendship and Something
12. Undercurrent
13. Folkin' Around
14. Now from the After
15. An Old Silver Revolver and Razed Fields
Dick dreams that Nixon is lying dead beside him, and his sister is wearing a white ceramic dress with painted blue flowers at the foot of the bed-the same pattern as his mother’s china. He wakes with a start in the place between dark and sunrise. He instinctively nudges the body next to him to see where the truth really lies. The back-story of his dream and the information of now are still tangled and Dick tries not to jump to conclusions until the lines are completely uncrossed. Not even the slow swell of Nixon’s chest pressed against his own convinces him fully-Dick waits until Nix lets out a sleepy order to stop fidgeting to accept it. Then he lets out a sigh and lets his head fall to the pillow again.
In the dream, Nixon had been clutching two things in his hands, curled up like a child against him. In one hand a toy pistol-an old silver revolver that Dick hoped would only click harmlessly-and the other a book bound on all four sides. He’d known through that murky dream logic that Nixon had been dead exactly two days, and in another day they were going to bury him, whether Dick had let go or not.
And Ann, in a low singsong voice, repeating, “Never goddamn nervous. You aren’t nice. That’s the first step.”
He chuckles in the quiet of his room, noticing that Nixon has somehow managed to take all the covers without really untangling himself from Dick.
He lifts his hand to move Lew’s dark hair off his forehead. The response is another wordless mumble and Nixon kicking absently in his sleep. He can only hope the dreaming is better on his side of the bed. Dick then closes his eyes and just lets himself separate from thought for a few more hours. Otherwise he’ll remember that sunrise brings the last day of August and when September rolls in there’s no guarantee Nixon will still be there. And Nixon will be upset enough for the both of them, he knows.
Dick expects the half-avoidant smirk, the extra carelessness in his gait, even the cynic edge to all his words as they toss a ball behind the house the next morning after breakfast. He can appreciate Nixon’s sometimes bratish responses to pain and duress probably spring from a very opulent but very unfulfilled life, even though they disappoint and grieve him all at once. Dick can’t pretend to know the depths of crimes his own blood has committed against him, but when he watches Nixon watch his mother approach, he doesn’t expect the cold, almost disgusted fury in his expression. With a carefully drawn brow, Dick catches the ball Nix had tossed the moment before in his father’s slightly oversized glove, then looks over his shoulder.
The polished Ford jumps down the tracks in the dusty driveway with a purpose. Nixon scoffs behind him, laughing a little only out of derision. Dick doesn’t turn around, but he hears it, loud and clear and heavy on him. “Found me.”
He doesn’t turn, tries not to encourage the bitterness in his voice. “Your mother was probably just worried about you. You didn’t exactly try hard to inform her where you went for the night.”
“It’s something of a family tradition not to tell each other absolutely anything,” Nixon says. He punches the palm of Dick’s glove absently. “I guarantee you she’s not stopping in for lemonade.”
Dick presses his lips together in uncertainty. He can’t stop noticing the sharp edge of fear in Nixon’s smallest motions. When he does open his mouth, Nixon shakes his head and cuts him off. “No, I can go myself, it’ll be fine,” he says. “I’m a big boy-I tie my shoes and everything.” Without looking at him, he hands Dick his glove and walks past, headed across the lawn to the mouth of the driveway, where his mother is stepping out of the car in a pair of heels.
She stands and waits for him, as cold as her clothes are tailored.
“Nix-”
“Just be a minute. Keep it warm for me,” he answers with a wave of his hand.
Dick also doesn’t expect the almost lifeless way Nixon stands in front of his mother while she talks-ostensibly upset about her son running off to “god-knew where” for a night. Despite the distance, Dick sees his normal, undimmed spark of honesty-sometimes crude and challenging and sometimes wounded-shift to hide behind something. He nods to whatever she says with a short, anxious motion. Having gotten her apology, she climbs back into the car, reminds him pointedly of something once more, and drives off.
Nixon makes the journey back more quickly, rolling his eyes all the while over a string of muttered curses. Dick gives him a small smile in the hopes it’ll remedy something-not a smile fueled by joy but worry. Nixon doesn’t look up to see it, even when he walks straight past.
There’s a familiar clatter of the white-painted screen door swinging shut that draws Dick’s attention for a moment, allowing Nixon to gain ground as he trudges unhappily off. To where, Dick can only guess-but he turns to look instead at the front of the house. His mother is there, squinting in the sun after the brand new Ford leaving the drive. Straight from the kitchen sink, now watching the dust settle in the car’s wake.
She’s drying her hands on her apron when she looks at him in return. The distance prevents him from seeing her expression clearly, but after a moment of mutual consideration, Dick turns to follow Nixon and she watches him go without a word.
He’s not surprised Nixon’s always carrying some sort of intoxicant with him these days. He’s just surprised to see how much cigarette is burnt away by the time Dick catches up. He’s fled to the slightly overgrown part behind the barn sheltered by a few trees, head bowed the whole way. Apparently unnoticed by all other parties, Dick believes he’s known Nixon long enough and deep enough to see the internal shift in him these late summer days. Barely curtailed desperation moves his hand whenever he touches, whether it is to tap his carton of cigarettes loose, to rub the sweat from his brow, or to pull Dick by his forearm close enough to bury his face away from something in his shoulder.
He does his best to act unconcerned whenever he can, but Dick’s there most of the time and he always ends up slipping up once or twice.
Nixon settles his back against the barn and eases himself down until he’s sitting, legs lying crookedly out in front of him.
“What did she want?” Dick asks, when a minute passes and only the orange tip of his cigarette moves.
“Every first-born son of Israel,” Nixon says angrily.
“Well,” comes the half-tired answer, “we’re both in the same boat, then.” Dick decides that baseball and the rest of the day is going to have to wait a while-for at least one more cigarette, if he’s feeling saintly enough to let it go-and sits down beside Nix behind the barn. “Or maybe just a basket set adrift in the reeds.”
He even gets a little delayed laughter at his answer after a few minutes. Nixon’s mind seems to be coming slowly around from wherever it had gone and eventually appreciates his reference. His muted laugh transfers across from where they touch-elbows, knees, shoulders-the benign and brotherly places during the day. They’ll find the needful places when they feel a little safer and make sure whatever they can’t say is understood.
Nixon finally pulls the cigarette from his mouth and gives a long, smoky exhale. “She wants me to go back when I’m done saying goodbye,” he answers. But he takes another generous drag before he continues, and Dick waits.
He hangs his head and motions vaguely with his free hand. “Whenever that will be… Pack up, head home, you know. School’s due to start soon.”
“That boring, productive place.” Dick smiles. “It’ll miss you if you don’t go.”
The scoff is marked by a thick puff of blue-tinged white smoke. “Not as much as I won’t miss it.”
Dick watches his toes with a faint smile, tapping them absently in the air. “I’d offer you a place to stay here, but the barn stalls are all full.” But no real smile can he yet wrangle from Nixon, just the automatic twitch of his lips around the cigarette.
He stares into an unknowable distance, somewhere else and sitting there behind the barn at the same time. “Tomorrow-Goddamn, has it already been three months?”
“That’s all the longer summer is, Nix,” Dick points out calmly.
“Yeah, well, summer in Havana goes all fuckin’ year long.”
He’s unable to keep his unhappiness neatly boxed and housed in storage miles away from him. He can’t just fold it up and put it away whenever his parents and societal niceties demand it of him, and he can’t do it now. Especially not now.
Not when Dick’s looking so evenly at him, never judging, only watching and listening. He hates wondering if it’s only when he looks Dick in the eye it’ll feel like putting his feet up and finally getting a deep breath.
Nixon chooses to turn away and look out across the yard, nervously tearing a piece of long grass.
“I’ll miss you,” Dick says a few minutes later. Nix closes his eyes and pushes back against the force of something pushing out from his chest and the back of his eyes. He’s not sure if he hears, “too,” in there or only wants to hear it. It’s so quiet and simple a statement it makes his sigh an overwhelming noise.
He doesn’t have the nerve to answer him because he knows he’ll embarrass himself if he opens his mouth. So, eyes still barred shut against the world and against himself, he leans across the gap and rests his head on Dick’s shoulder behind the barn.
“You never unpacked, did you?”
“Not really.”
Dick smirks and runs a few reverent fingertips along Nixon’s wrist where the veins beat. “All the more time to say goodbye.”
Lewis strolls back home so near to the beginning of the next day he thinks it’s hardly worth the effort of crawling into bed only to be roused in a few hours by the help. His mother would be furious with him, no doubt-she’d trill about how traumatic it’d been to not know where he’d been. But only as soon as she got all her beauty sleep. Nixon wished, grinning a Cheshire cat’s grin, she were awake and standing at the door and asking where he’d gone just to tell her that he’d been fucking another boy in the ripened corn fields. To see her reaction through an endorphin-laced filter would be especially priceless.
Instead, he settles for smiling in a daze as he lumbers up the stairs and wonders how Dick’s doing as he walks back homes. Will his father be pacing the floors in a disappointed scorn when he arrives? Will his mother join him there, or will she be awaiting him alone at the door with that smile-that all-knowing, quiet glow Dick has inherited-and a moderate punishment? They’d fallen asleep for a few hours after midnight in the fields before finally heading separate directions in the dark. Consequences were a mutual overwrite-they’d accept whatever punishment came their way. Not that they’d thought about anything like that while trying to say a proper goodbye.
Nixon remembers trying to smooth the pink imprints of corn stalks and leaves out of Dick’s skin. He kicks off his shoes as he makes it up the stairs, and one clatters down a few steps in his carelessness. He pushes his door open, and there’s a square of moonlight on his stack of hardly-touched luggage in the corner.
He falls bonelessly onto his bed and remembers the way Dick loved to rake his fingers across Nixon’s navel and moan against his skin where his neck met his shoulder. He remembers Dick leading him to an old water stream now overgrown with grass, in the middle of the neighboring fields of ripe feeder corn. He remembers trying to remove the silk of a corncob for their dinner, and eventually handing it over to the more experienced party. He remembers it sensation by sensation until it’s dreaming.
Then Dick is kneeling in a razed field, cradling a bridled horse by the bit, kneeling and pressing his forehead to it’s own in a deeply reverent and pained gesture. Its skin is pale buckskin, and its hair dark, dark-lying with half of its body raised off weakly the ground. Nixon goes to him and counts the freckles on his bare back. He’s using Dick’s shoulder blade to rest his head when he wakes and tries to say, “1,481,” before it all becomes his mother’s feet thundering across the floor.
“Where were you?” she barks immediately, pulling the pillow from his arms.
Nixon smiles sleepily. “Lancaster County,” he answers, as if summer had all been a dream, and he laughs like it’s just the funniest thing ever said.