A Way With Words - Chapter 30
Note: This chapter contains a scene I wrote for a Brokeback slash beach/water challenge a over a year ago that some of you may have read. Some details have changed because when I originally posted it, I'd only written a couple chapters of this story.
May 1988
Ennis arrived at the Gardner museum ten minutes after saying goodbye to John Twist. Kaj was just coming out of the front entrance, still wearing his guard uniform. His eyes were cast down and he looked preoccupied. When he glanced up and saw Ennis outside the gate, he started - for a few seconds his expression was anything but guarded.
"You come to meet me," Kaj said, a smile lighting up his face.
For a brief moment, as he recalled what Twist had said about him, Ennis itched to slide Kaj's jacket from his shoulders and whisper Show me.
"I went to a baseball game with a friend. The ballpark is right near here," Ennis explained, waving in the direction of Fenway. "The game just ended and I'm going to the T stop."
They walked together to Huntington Avenue. Kaj told him he was going to play cricket in Franklin Park again the next day. Did he want to join him? Ennis was tempted, but Jay wasn't working on Sunday and they hadn't done anything together in a while. A couple of her friends were going on a whale watch cruise out of Boston harbor and they were to join them. So he told Kaj he had other plans.
"I'm missing the beach," Kaj sighed while they were waiting at the trolley stop. "Are there any near Boston?"
Ennis smiled to himself; Kaj was on another fishing trip
A trolley pulled up and they boarded it.
"From our house in Colombo it's easy to get to the beach."
"So I gathered."
"Sorry?"
"About what?"
"What?"
Ennis couldn't help laughing. He'd just spent three hours sitting with someone he didn't have to explain anything to, and now this.
"You want me to tell you how to get to the beach?"
"No, Ennis. I like you to take me there. Why I have to explain everything to you like you are a little boy?"
"Now wait a minute, I'm not..." When Ennis saw Kaj grinning, his retort died on his lips. Somehow this man always managed to keep him off balance. It was at once annoying and thrilling. And disturbing. When the hell would those mysterious papers be ready?
"Well, I guess we could go to Revere Beach," he conceded. "It's on the Blue Line. But we should wait until June. It won't be very warm now."
"I don't know if I will still be here in June."
Ennis had to wait a few seconds to find his voice. "Next weekend wouldn't work. But... I could take next Monday off."
"Really?"
He nodded.
The following Friday morning Ennis was summoned to a department heads meeting.
"Where's Tina today?" he asked. Only Dana the copy editor and Carol from the art department were there.
"In California. Her brother's dying."
"Oh, poor Tina!" exclaimed Carol. "Is it cancer?"
"Pneumonia."
"Oh god..."
Ennis had a sinking feeling.
"You know what my mother said to me last night? She's glad I'm a dyke, because I'm perfectly safe. MY mother. That's how bad it is now."
"I've lost two friends so far."
"Are you going to do that walk-a-thon thing next month?"
"I'll be away that weekend."
"Me too. I'd give money to anyone who walked, though, and get my friends to pledge, too."
"I'll do the walk," Ennis said. "When is it?"
The two women looked at him in surprise.
"June fifth. I can bring you a pledge form on Monday."
"I... I won't be in. I'm taking a personal day," he said.
"Well, I'll start passing it around the office."
"Yeah, Ennis, we'll get all the pledges so all you have to do is walk."
At noon on Monday Ennis met Kaj at the turnstiles in Government Center T station as they'd arranged. When he saw Kaj approaching, he was glad he'd stuffed an extra shirt in his knapsack because he could see his friend was a bit optimistic about the temperature on Revere Beach. He wore a short sleeved, gaily tropical shirt with large blue flowers on a white background, and a pair of aviator sunglasses was perched jauntily on top of his head, half buried in his thick dark hair.
"You're not expecting to swim, are you?" Ennis said when he spotted the towel in the canvas bag he was carrying. It was a sunny day and quite warm, but he knew the water would be freezing.
Kaj shrugged. "I will just paddle around, not swim like serious." Ennis looked away to hide his smile. Twenty minutes later they got off at the Revere Beach stop and walked the two blocks to the shore. Ennis hadn't been back since the summer he and Joe had worked together at Legal Sea Foods, but it hadn't changed at all.
"This is not what I expect." They were standing on the concrete promenade along the sea wall, looking out over the stretch of coarse beige sand and flat gray-green water. Having seen pictures of the beautiful beaches of Sri Lanka he understood Kaj's disappointment. No graceful palms, no golden sand and no turquoise sea frilled with foamy waves. The curve of the bay with the cityscape to their right meant there was no wide vista towards a distant horizon.
"There're better beaches further away but we'd have to take the train..." And after going all that way you'd probably be just as disappointed with them because they're nothing like the beaches you left behind.
"It's alright, Ennis," Kaj said. "I'm glad to come here with you. But I wish I bring another shirt."
"I thought of that," Ennis replied, opening his knapsack. "Here." He handed Kaj his old denim shirt, which still had blood stains on the sleeve . After Kaj put on the shirt, they found the nearest stairs down to the beach, took off their shoes and put them in Kaj's bag, then walked down toward the wet sand where dried scum marked the tide line. Trying to ignore the flotsam on the surface a few yards out, Ennis rolled the cuffs of his jeans up to his knees and waded calmly into the undulating water, keeping his back to Kaj to hide his grimace.
"Aaeeiiiii!!! Shit shit shit!!" A long string of incomprehensible syllables followed and Ennis turned to see Kaj jumping back from the frigid water like it was a venomous snake.
"How you go near this fucking dirty ice water?" he shouted. "It's not funny, Ennis!"
Ennis was laughing as he stepped quickly back onto the sand. His feet were numb. He explained that the water wouldn’t really warm up until August, not that many people came here to get wet, and proposed that they take a walk north past the highrise apartment buildings where the beach was nearly empty.
They strolled for a mile, talking about cricket and baseball and movies, trading stories about their families' farms. Kaj hadn't finished his university studies; it had seemed pointless, since he would be expected to work in the family tea business. But the civil war changed everything, he said. Ennis didn't ask him to elaborate.
“Too bad there is nobody lying on the beach,” Kaj said.
"Why? I like it empty. Anyway, it's the middle of the work day and too early in the season."
"In Sri Lanka, it's always the season."
"You used to go to the beach every day?"
"Nah. Anyway, most guys go to the beach for the show."
"What show?"
"You know, the Europeans lying in the sand with no clothes."
Ennis had learned months before that, for Kaj, "Europeans" meant white people. “The Irish" meant racist white people, like the kind who gave Kaj dirty looks in parts of Dorchester. He'd given up trying to argue him out of his opinion, hoping that Toronto and its many Irish-Canadians would set a better example than Boston.
"Lotta naked tourists on the beaches?"
"Almost naked. Just small swimming costumes. Since the war, not so many tourists come. But Sri Lankan people don't take off clothes on the beach. Women go in the water in their saris."
"How do they swim wearing a sari?"
"Sri Lankan girls don't learn to swim. They just splash around in the waves. On the beach, you can see Sri Lankan guys stand together. Three, four guys in a circle, talking, little way from a European woman. They wear sunglasses and stand like this."
Kaj turned and faced Ennis, standing with his hands in his pants pockets and gazing past him as he talked.
"Two guys with their back to the woman, they keep talking while the other guys look at her. Little while, they turn the circle, let another one have a look."
"You did that often? With your friends?"
Kaj switched his gaze to Ennis very briefly, then looked down at the sand, digging his toe into it. "One time."
Kaj looked away from the water toward the rocks and boulders that divided the beach from the roadway now that they were beyond the end of the promenade. "I like to sit down now," he said.
They walked over to the largest rock, which sheltered them somewhat from the breeze. Kaj sat down cross-legged in the sand and Ennis sat on his right with his knees up, resting his forearms on them. He turned over and over in his fingers a mussel shell he'd picked up. He heard Kaj sigh and turned to look a him.
"Homesick?"
"Sorry?"
"Do you miss your home?"
Kaj stared out at the water for a long minute. "Yes," he said finally, "and no."
Ennis understood exactly what he meant.
"My sister Mayuri find out the truth, that she is not from our family," Kaj said suddenly.
"When? How?"
"My mother write me a letter. Mayuri went to India with Lakshmi last month to visit Hindu temples in Tamil Nadu. A priest in one of them told her."
"How... how could he know that?"
"He look at her and ask her if she is talking to her mother recently. She say yes, just last night I call her in Sri Lanka. The priest say, that is not your mother. Your mother is very ill and wants to see you before she dies."
"And she believed him? Just like that?"
"First she says no, it's a lie. But he insist many times. Finally Mayuri takes a taxi to airport and flies back to Sri Lanka - alone! She goes to my parents and ask if this is true. They say no, but she ask again and again and finally they tell the truth. So now she is trying to find out who is her mother. She is thinking maybe it was a tea plantation worker who left her at the door."
It seemed like a crazy story, but Ennis was getting used to that. And this one... there was a time when he would have been glad to learn such a thing about his own origins, would have welcomed the news. He kept that thought to himself.
"Your family is... having a lot of problems," he said after a moment. "This one is not your fault, though."
"But I…"
"This one is not a punishment," Ennis said firmly, watching a gull wheeling over the water. A jet with a Union Jack on the tail came in low over the harbor for a landing at Logan; its roar drowned out any other sound for a long moment.
After the plane landed, the silence between them stretched out. Kaj did the same, pulling the rolled up white towel from his bag and tucking it between his head and the sand. He closed his eyes. Ennis remained sitting, shifting his gaze back and forth between the gull dipping and diving and Kaj's chest rising and falling, his brown hands folded over the denim shirt. Kaj claimed red was his favorite color, but Ennis thought he looked best in blue.
He was watching a white sail moving toward Nahant when he was startled to feel Kaj's fingers wrap around his wrist, then lift Ennis' hand. He turned his head just as Kaj placed it on the bulge in his pants; when he tried to jerk it away, Kaj held fast.
"Please! I'm tired of using my own hand."
Ennis could feel Kaj's erection growing, and an answering fire in his own groin. He willed his hand not to caress and squeeze as his heart began to jump. Oh god how he wanted to! He yanked his hand from Kaj's grasp.
"Ennis, you have a girlfriend to do for you! This no big deal. When we were in the jungle, this what we had to do."
Ennis had heard about the No Marriage rule imposed by the Tamil Tigers’ leader. Now he understood that, in Sri Lanka, that meant no sex... with women. Kaj was just asking for a favor, because his situation here wasn't much different.
"Okay," he whispered.
Ennis looked around once more to make sure they couldn't be seen, then stretched out on his side next to Kaj, propped on his left elbow. Staring at the sky, Kaj unzipped his jeans, lifted his hips slightly so he could push his pants down a bit, and freed his stiff cock. Ennis watched him do this with his heart pounding, breath quick and shallow, staring. He felt he was crossing... no, he told himself, not a line, but a river to another shore. He could come back.
He lifted his sandy hand and wiped it very thoroughly on his own jeans.
"Come on, Ennis!" A seagull cried overhead just as Kaj whispered the words but Ennis could read his lips. His eyes were closed tightly, his lips parted. Ennis slowly reached over and touched his index finger to the tip where a pearly bead had formed and swirled it around the head. When Kaj gasped, he took his hand away and spit into it, then wrapped his fist around the shaft, letting his thumb spread spit and slick around the head and then down, not so much listening to the sighs and groans coming from inches away from his face as letting them pour through him. He closed his eyes and concentrated on getting a steady rhythm going. Kaj’s low, urgent grunts set fire to his blood, which his heart pumped furiously in just one direction. Puffs of warm, cumin-scented breath wafted across his cheek, lips so close he could...
Suddenly his eyes flew open as he felt Kaj's hand clamp tightly around his wrist; seconds later, Kaj was thrusting up into Ennis' hand and groaning loud and deep, "On baaaay!". No time to wonder what he meant as hot spunk pulsed out and Ennis tried to limit the spill by trapping it in his cupped hand. When Kaj's hips had stopped jerking, Ennis wiped his palm and fingers on the end of the towel pillowing his friend's head.
Kaj sighed and pulled up his jeans. "Want me to do you now?"
Oh God yes! Do me! It's just... that I can't- "No... that's okay."
But Kaj was eyeing the enormous bulge and wet spot at the front of Ennis' jeans. "What, you gonna wait hours for your girlfriend to take care of that? It's no problem, I do it now so you can be decent on the train."
In a flash Kaj had Ennis unbuttoned and unzipped and his hand inside his briefs. Ennis exploded seconds after Kaj touched him, thrusting his hips, his supporting arm collapsing so his head was almost butting into his friend's.
"Oh Jesus!" he gasped, and instantly a memory rose up, of listening Dr Ruth with Joe. When his pulse had finally slowed and Kaj had wiped his hand, he rolled onto his back with a groan.
"What's your…favorite…flavor of ice cream?" he murmured drowsily.
Many seconds passed.
"Mango."
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