The Value Of Rain Read online

  A car passed close to the house, illuminating the slow shadowy trickle of snowflakes in the fog. The car slowed, and as the light from its headlights grew softer, I heard the gritty sound of a plow putting sand down against the ice. The car honked thankfully before the two passed and their cadence faded into the weight of the snow. It made me wonder, who was the car here and who was the truck?

  I decided to smoke in the dark and turned off the lights, wondering, as I stared out at the icy void, if I could get used to this again; to smokes, and warmth, and money.

  Too much had changed. All of it, and yet nothing. I was dead inside; my soul grey and dusty; ash from where anger and rage had burned all feeling away. Now I was just an active lump of flesh, a scarred bit of human detritus finally spat out from the torrent of malicious and misused power. I obeyed only impulses, quiet inward tics of unconsciousness and hate. Everyone had changed but me, me and my hate. I wondered, had Charlotte seen all this before she zonked out on me?

  The bedroom door slipped open and light cracked against the dusk of the room. Penny poked her head in, sniffing at the smoke. I exhaled into the draft of the window so that it would spread further into the room.

  “It’s time for her pills,” Penny said, barging in further.

  “She doesn’t need anything.”

  “But...”

  “Out!”

  Her eyes blistered the darkness, their touch thick with animosity as I chuckled. She had no idea that she was dealing with such a well versed acolyte. I had learned hate from a master who herself had made loathing into a science. What did Penny know of the weight of rage?

  The door closed with a quick muted crack and with it my sudden eruption of resentment. But the stench of duplicity that simmered in this house was not of Penny’s making; so why was it that the sight of her made the old but sudden tensions of childhood rise in my throat again? I thought on it for a moment but the darkness of the room felt suddenly, and unexpectedly, brutal; and I couldn’t figure out why until I noticed that the fog had rolled in through the window and spilled in a small ring around Charlotte’s bed.

  Was she dead?

  I moved closer, turned on the lights, and studied the sheets to find the slight rise and fall of her breath. It was still there. I hadn’t missed it.

  Chapter Two

  August 1971

  I sat on a bench in Putnam Park. I was fourteen and my grandfather, Francois, had just died three days before. I hadn’t cried yet, not at the funeral, not at the wake, nor during the three days Charlotte had forced me to stay inside.

  I was waiting for Robert Massey, a friend who lived nearby with his mother and two sisters. A beautiful boy with an easy grin, Robert had jet black hair, grey-blue eyes, and a dappling of freckles across his nose. He was long limbed and lithe, and, really, the only friend I had.

  During my three days of enforced mourning I had come to the realization that I was secretly in love with Robert, and had been for some time. This thought had mortified me and filled me with a deep shame. Boys weren’t supposed to have such feelings for other boys. My family had names for people like that; fear filled, hateful names that they would have been pleased to shower down on me if I even hinted at the idea of homosexuality.

  I watched Robert as he came down the oak lined sidewalk, his gait light, his smile perpetual, and the delicacy of his movement a quiet misstatement about the strength of character I thought he carried inside. He saw me and his face lit up as he waved, his restless exuberance washing over me like a soft recuperative breath.

  I forced a smile. I didn’t want to cry. Not here. Not in front of Robert, not him of all people.

  Yet oddly, I knew that I would.

  Robert’s face darkened as he sat, a look of bewildered concern capturing his features as his smile faded.

  I noted a fresh bruise high on his cheek and another on his opposite arm; his father had undoubtedly taken him for another weekend visit and kicked him around while spouting the correlation between violence and masculinity; the asshole’s motto being some bullshit about being the victimizer of society instead of its constant victim.

  Anger welled within me and tried to push back the tears, but Robert, who never seemed to take the hardships of life too seriously, simply shrugged it off; gentling that facet of my personality that always tried to swallow someone else’s pain before I had even learned how to handle my own.

  Robert was studious, smart, and had heart. His father beat him for his gentleness, while his mother overlooked him because she didn’t know how to deal with him. I loved him because he made me feel loved; because his presence caressed that scowling part of me that desperately wanted to believe that love could conquer any prejudice, any betrayal; that it could halt the slow encroachment of Charlotte’s perpetual cruelty; if I could ever find it.

  He reached up to thumb away an escaping tear and I turned into his hand avoiding the pain I saw reflected in his face. I brushed my lips across his palm and inhaled the light salt of his body.

  “Charles, what’s wrong?” he asked, his brow folded in concern.

  From his lips my name fell like honey, a poignant contrast to Charlotte’s screech, in whose voice my name sounded like the scuttling timbre of bugs. It was this, his simple utterance of my name that caused the dam to explode and flood his fingers with my tears. I couldn’t help myself, there were too many weathered years, and too many lonely days spent yearning to be loved. I wailed for the friend that I had lost in my grandfather, and I howled because my mother despised me. I bawled because Robert’s father beat him and because his mother couldn’t find time for him, and lastly, I mourned because the feelings I had for him could never be truly shown without our mutual destruction.

  Robert drew me into an embrace and moved passersby on with an assured wave of his hand. He hushed me with coos, calmed me with caresses, and quieted me as he stroked my hair and rocked me.

  When my tears had finally dwindled down to a quiet staccato of hiccups, he suggested we go to his house.

  “Your mother,” I answered wiping at my face with my t-shirt.

  “She went shopping with my sisters,” he said. “Come on.”

  He never broke contact as we walked to his house, but hovered around me like a hen throwing protective wings around her chick. When we arrived he sat me on his bed and washed my tears away with a hot face-cloth; drawing off my frustrations at not being able to hide my pain in front of him.

  He was gentle. He pushed me back on the bed, swung me around, and captured my head on his pillow after he tucked my shoes neatly underneath. I pulled off my shirt because it was full of snot and tears, and lay back while he sat beside me and had me tell him, once again, of the private moments my grandfather and I had shared together.

  Robert was especially fond of the time my grandfather had taken me out fishing, got himself stewed on beer, and then fell into the river, all the while claiming and clowning that it was the thrashing of my eight ounce trout that had propelled him into the brink when he tried to remove it from my hook.

  We laughed as I reanimated Francois’ insistence.

  “That’s what you cherish, Charles. That laughter in your heart right now,” Robert told me.

  I looked at him in awe. He had such poise, such maturity; the tender brush of his touch, the sacred quality of his listening, his attendance, the undiluted ardor of his affections. I couldn’t help but wonder how a boy of his age knew such things, possessed such qualities, and moved me with such unhurried earnestness. It seemed unfathomable.

  When he bent down and kissed me I was lost.

  There was no shame, no fumbling, no awkwardness, only the melding together of two warm souls. It seemed an angelic decree that we who had been cursed, screamed at, and abused should fall together and evolve and mature in each other’s arms.

  But our parting was not so romantic.

  We fell asleep in the dewy naked lust of the late afternoon and awoke to the dark screams of hysteria. Robert’s mother found us
, our just-hairing bodies intertwined in a melody of alabaster limbs and semi-sweet musk. We flew from the bed knowing we’d been discovered, but still not quite conscious of its verity.

  Lies ran through my head as I jumped into my underwear, slid on my pants and shod my sockless feet. I was too young and immature to ever be able to explain to this furious mother how much I was in love with her son.

  But our ages would not have permitted it anyway. I knew that even then. Boys didn’t get together for a session of climax and emotional arousal. We were pigs, vile beasts wallowing in shit, and despicable blots on our family names. We were bad gum on old shoes. But the worst, we were faggots, queers; destined to hell and damnation for the rest of eternity. By the time Mrs. Massey got to Charlotte, I had ruined, fouled, and perverted Robert’s manhood. Everything was my fault. My lecherous mind had corrupted her son and she wanted retribution. She wanted it publically announced in a court of law that I was a homo, a fag, and a pervert.

  For once, Charlotte could only stare. My actions had struck her mute. She endured Mrs. Massey’s tirade with a glaze of disbelief in her eyes, stapling me to the ground; her fingers deep in my shoulder. I could almost see Charlotte’s self-built prestige slipping out, drop by drop, as Robert’s mother raved about our lasciviousness, how she found us, the scent in the room, my seed inside her son.

  The only sounds when she finished was her own hostile breath and my uncle Jarrel vibrating in the corner with silent laughter. He sobered the instant my mother’s attention turned on him and offered Mrs. Massey an immediate alternative; private commitment in a psychiatric youth hospital to learn the error of my ways. He would provide the cash, as long as it was kept quiet.

  Charlotte and I glanced at each other and paled at the same instant, but for completely different reasons.

  Mrs. Massey stared at me, at us, and took a long time before she acknowledged Jarrel’s offer. In her eyes I saw her recognition of my feelings for Robert, but I also witnessed an old unvoiced pain that rose up when she fixed her eyes on Charlotte. When it finally came back to me, her gaze held only an absolute unwillingness to accept the barbarity of my feelings for her son. Pulling from the anguish she saw in my eyes, Mrs. Massey looked directly into Charlotte’s face, sneered, and condemned me to hell.

  “Send him,” she answered Jarrel with a cold lipped conviction.

  Jarrel brayed with laughter as Charlotte’s expression crumbled in on itself in complete humiliation. Mrs. Massey turned without another word and stormed from the house as Charlotte whirled, slapped me in the face, and stomped from the room.

  Jarrel winked with a chuckle still firm on his lips and told me to be packed and ready to go in the morning. He called out a hearty goodbye to Charlotte, chased Mrs. Massey down and left me tear streaked and desolate in the empty foyer.

  For a moment I contemplated the still open door and its representation of freedom. If I had known what terrors lay ahead of me, I would have raced from the house and never looked back. But I didn’t, fear held me rooted. I turned and went to my room, head hung low, still in a state of adolescent disbelief and harboring the vain hope that, for once, Charlotte would be at my side.

  I should have known better. The only consolation I ever got was from my bed, which greeted me like an old friend as I fell into its soft plank and bawled like a child half my age. When I heard Charlotte engage an ancient and previously unused lock on my door, I realized that all the pleading in the world would gain me nothing. I was dead to her and had been for years.

  For a moment I considered banging on the door and wailing; jumping out the window and running; and finally, I considered opening a razor and slitting my own throat. In the end, I just hugged my pillow tighter and let its warmth soak up all the years of failure and unshed tears I still had wrapped up inside me.

  The next morning Jarrel kicked the door open to wake me. Charlotte wasn’t around and he wasn’t about to waste time trying to find the key.

  “Come on you little dick sucker, time to go,” he announced gleefully.

  I hadn’t packed. Jarrel simply grabbed me by the back of the neck, snatched my shoes from the floor and marched me out to the car barefoot, where Mrs. Massey sat like a statue in the front seat.

  “Doesn’t she have water in that house?” Mrs. Massey snapped at Jarrel after he put me in the back seat.

  Shame filled me anew. I could smell my own odor but I hadn’t been able to wash since absconding from Robert’s room. Underneath the overriding stench of fear that my body continued to pour out, his scent still clung to me.

  I dropped my head and stared at my naked feet. I could feel Jarrel’s eyes on me in the mirror and did not look up.

  “If Francois could see you now,” Jarrel clucked as he started the car.

  Tears fell, but I said nothing.

  We drove in absolute silence. I again considered begging and pleading, but one look at the hilarity in Jarrel’s eyes, and the hardened resolution in Mrs. Massey’s profile was enough to keep my useless petitions in abeyance.

  When we finally stopped some hours later all three of us glanced up at a dingy brick facade, too high fences and barred windows. It was enough to undo me.

  “Please, Mrs. Massey. Please don’t do this to me. I love him, you know I do. Please.” I couldn’t stop, the words welled up out of me like blood from an open wound. But they had no effect. Mrs. Massey wrenched her gaze from the building and stared forward, saying nothing.

  Two huge white-clad orderlies came out of the main entrance and met us at the car. They each took an arm when I stepped out and half dragged me into the building as Jarrel and Mrs. Massey tagged along behind.

  We went through a maze of hallways and locked doors until we were met by a silver haired man whose tufted eyebrows seemed interwoven with the hair on his head. He introduced himself as Dr. Barrow.

  “Strip,” was the only thing he said to me, all else was directed at the emotionless faces of my two escorts.

  I burned red. He pointed to a hospital bed and ran me through a complete and thorough physical as Jarrel and Mrs. Massey impassively looked on. He stopped only once to announce to them that I had been penetrated, which he dutifully put in his notes.

  “This boy needs a bath,” he said to the orderlies.

  “Any questions?” he asked Jarrel and Mrs. Massey as he removed his gloves and tossed them in the trash.

  “I thought Dr. Minot would be greeting us,” Jarrel said.

  Dr. Barrow shrugged. “He asked me to step in this morning, some official duty that couldn’t wait. But I’m sure he’ll be back by lunch if you care to wait.”

  “No,” Mrs. Massey said immediately. “I have my own son to attend to.”

  “Very well, let me call you an escort ,” Barrow offered as he picked up the phone.

  I stood naked, humiliated and silent, staring at the floor as tears continued to chap my face. It was then that I came to the sudden realization that Charlotte’s enemies had somehow become mine. I looked up at the two of them. I didn’t know how I knew it, or what their reasons were, but I knew that I had just become the stick they were using to swing at Charlotte’s head. And they knew, I knew.

  When their escort came, Dr Barrow politely saw them to the door then turned to me and gave my orderlies a dismissive wave, making it obvious that he had more important things to do.

  I was lugged through another maze of hallways and locked doors and pushed into a rough cement square that had a rusted grate in the floor as its only decoration. One of the orderlies tossed me an old flaking bar of blue lye soap while the other unwound a hose and sprayed me down with cold water. They smoked and laughed while I danced to their directions and when they finally grew bored; the bigger one tossed me a scrim-thin towel and told me to dry off. I was then marched to a supply window where I was issued a paper jumpsuit and an old mildewed mattress so thin that the roaches made speed bumps in it when they raced underneath.

  After yet another march, and at the end of another i
ll-lit hall, I was dumped into a small room with a cement block bed, a steel toilet, and a muted blur of light near the ceiling, which I assumed was a window. Terror and anguish were the only two things that I could claim as companions, and I clung to them fiercely. But that was before rage slowly began to fill the chasm that my tears and shame had left behind. The more I thought about what was being done to me, the more I thought about revenge.

  Early on the third day the door to my cell opened in a furious commotion. It revealed a ferret faced man with brown marble-hard eyes and an almost hairless dome that seemed ridiculously large. This was Dr. Harold Minot.

  Instinct instantly cautioned me to be wary. Here, it said, was a man of small and unpleasant tortures. He wouldn’t leave visible scars, only salt tracked on downied cheeks and gulches carved into the psyches of still-forming minds.

  It did not take me long to find out how correct my intuition had been.

  “Do you know where you are?” he asked.

  I shook my head, no.

  “This is Sanctuary. This is where we keep society’s adolescent degenerates,” he said as he took my file from under his arm and opened it slowly.

  He looked at me over the top of the file, pulling reading glasses up from a chain hidden inside his coat. “Hmm. Queer, huh?”

  “I want to go. Please,” I implored him.

  He chuckled and tucked my file under his arm again. “This is your home, Charles. You’ve been thrown away, and I hate to say it, but it doesn’t really seem like anyone cares.”

  He whipped out my file a second time. “Look at your name for instance, Charles. Do you have any idea where it came from? Why it’s different from your mothers?” he asked insistently.

  I shook my head rapidly. I had wondered many times but had always been afraid to ask.

  “I didn’t either, so I checked on it when I saw the commitment papers,” Minot said. “Charles Benedict: from the womb of Charlotte and the loins of a liar,” he explained. “Witty, isn’t it?” he asked as he wagged his eyebrows at me. “A perpetual reminder of how much your mother abhors you.”