Bleeder Read online

  Afterwards, neither of us has the courage to speak. There are no words to frame here, but only an awkward feeling. I cower beneath her sheets. I stare at her ceiling. I make a feeble attempt at placing my arms around her.

  “You don’t have to hold me,” she says.

  “I want to.”

  And she lets me. But now we have dressed up our relationship as a new friendship, a dreadful thing to do.

  “Were you planning on staying the night?” Ana asks as I settle my heavy heart beside her.

  “I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t thought things through.”

  “But you are now?”

  “Yes. I’m staying tonight.”

  Ana flips on the television. “I’ll order pizza,” she says.

  And the familiar comforts us, persuades our hearts away from notions of ruin and decay.

  When the weekend ends, Ana walks me to the parking lot. I cast my eyes to the ground, and we do not link hands as we drift through the courtyard of fallen leaves. They lie in piles of dying color: orange sassafras, scarlet maple, yellow poplar, and maroon sweetgum. Blown by the wind, they leave the trees exposed to the coming cold. We proceed down the campus walk, coming eventually to the gravel lot and my small truck. I unlock my cab door, settle my bag within, and turn to Ana.

  “So is this it?” she asks. “Is this where you say your good-bye? Or will I see you again?”

  I absently draw my foot through gravel.

  “I don’t know, Ana. I’m not so sure this friendship thing is going to work out.”

  “No,” she cries out. “Don’t do this. Not like this.” I try to reach for her, but she deflects me with her hand. “Stay away. Just stay away if that’s how you want it.” She wipes her eyes. “What was this, some kind of conjugal visit? Is that what this weekend was about? Is that what I was good for?”

  “Ana, please. This isn’t how I wanted it.”

  “No. No. You’re an asshole! Fuck you!” A flock of sparrows riffles from the elm trees and instinctively, I turn and watch—a flap of black in a clouded autumn sky. “Just fuck you!” she yells again.

  “But Ana, please!”

  She runs off, arms flailing at her side. “Fuck you, you asshole!”

  I fold my hands over my eyes and tears spill out. And this is how it ends: in hate.

  SUMMER 21

  MAY 1993. MOM, DAD, AND I ARRIVE AT MY SUMMER RESIDENCE IN downtown Wilmington. It is an enormous house set on a small lot with the neighboring homes bearing in upon it from the sides. We walk in and up the stairs guarded on the stout banister by carved owls, and on the top landing, we follow the slender hallway to where it spills onto a petite balcony; the backyard unfolds in summer green and is bound on three sides by a uniform wooden fence painted in colonial white, a landscape that momentarily transports me to another time.

  We retrace our steps down the hall to a shut door that I slip open, revealing a dwarfish room.

  “This is it,” Mom says. “This can’t be much more than a glorified broom closet with a window.”

  “But you can’t beat a hundred dollars a month.”

  “If it’s the money, Son, we can help you out. What about your roommates? How much are they paying?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. Maybe two, three hundred. It doesn’t matter, though. This is what I can afford.” I look around, breathe in. “And besides, I like it all right.”

  “How is he going to stand living here without air conditioning?” Mom asks, addressing Dad. “How?”

  Dad looks around, doesn’t answer.

  “I’ll be fine, Mom. It’s only for a few months anyway.”

  “You’re just going to have to accept that our son’s growing up,” Dad says to Mom.

  “Well, I don’t like it,” she says to Dad. “You need to take care of yourself,” she then says to me. “Don’t forget that. Your health always comes first.”

  “I won’t forget it. I’ll be fine.”

  She miffs her face, raises her hands in a gesture of exasperation. “Okay. Fine. Let’s move you in.”

  For the duration of the afternoon, we unload my belongings, and when Mom leaves to get the last of my things from the car, Dad knocks a cigarette from his pack and lights it. He leans over to catch his breath and then rights himself again. “Your mom’s just upset because I’m not going to be home this summer, either.”

  “You’re not? Why not? What’s going on?”

  “The plant in town’s not doing good. I’m pretty sure it’s going under, so I’m getting out while I still have a chance.”

  “I don’t understand. What are you going to do?”

  “Well, Son, I called a friend, and I’m going to be consulting for a few factories. I’ll move from place to place and show them how to set up the fabric cutters so they can save money.”

  “But where?”

  “Actually, here. Wilmington. It’s my first job.”

  “Wilmington? You’re going to be here this summer?”

  “Yes. Your mom and I didn’t want to tell you because, well . . . we just found out, and I knew we were coming here and could just tell you then.”

  “Wow. I’m shocked.” I spread my clothes out along my mattress. “So when do you start?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “And the bills? You and Mom can still pay them?”

  “That’s got your mom a bit on edge,” Dad says, breathing out another puff of smoke. “But I think we’re going to be fine.”

  Mom returns with the final box of my clothes, bracing her hands underneath it.

  “Where do you want this?” she asks, a bit winded from her ascent. “It doesn’t look like it’ll fit in that closet of yours, but you need to be careful with it. The bottom’s about to fall out.”

  “Out there in the hallway is fine,” I say. She lowers the box to the floor and slides it against the wall.

  “Did you tell him?” Mom asks Dad, who quickly answers that he did. “I’m not too happy about it,” she says to me, “but I’m just glad that maybe you two will get to see one another. Dad’s suppose to check to make sure you’re eating right and not starving in this cave.”

  “Think of it like Plato’s cave. From within, I’ll contemplate the world.”

  “Ha-ha. The true scholar, eh?”

  Together, we unpack a few more boxes until my room is soon full and we agree that we can fit no more. There’s space for a mattress, clothes, a few books, CDs, and a small TV-tray where I place my jambox. The bed is just comfortable enough and the room sufficiently good. I remove the rest of my items to a storage space underneath the stairwell, one that Dad claims outsizes my own room. Then we sit on the front porch and sip glasses of cool water as a warm breeze blows through the downtown avenue. We let out our fatigue and take in the homes and their historic architecture.

  After a while, Dad shuffles his feet and reaches over to pat Mom on her hand.

  “Well,” he says, “I reckon we should get going, let our son get settled in and let us start the drive home.”

  And so they gather up and Dad cools the car while we say good-bye underneath the river birches and summer magnolias.

  “It’s gonna be hard not even having you home this summer,” Mom says. “You all grow up so fast.” She hugs me and slips me some money. “This is to help with that first month. I wish I could give you more, but as it is, things with your dad’s job are already uncertain.”

  “Are you sure you can afford this?”

  “Yes. It’s okay. You take that. Pay your rent and use the little that’s left to buy yourself some food. You’re looking awfully thin and you won’t be home for me to fatten you up.”

  We hug again as the heat presses on us, the sun blazing in the sky.

  “Good-bye. We’ll miss you.” She gets in the car next to Dad. “Be sure you come visit when you’re not working.”

  “I will.”

  And they leave.

  Exhausted from the move, I return to my room and flip on the box fan and fall into the
mattress, which rests on the floor, and soon the lazy heat and the long day have their effects, and I fall asleep.

  In the blood lab at UNC Hospitals, I relinquish my arm to the phlebotomist. She tells me there’s going to be a little stick, and then she punctures me, draws her tubes of blood, and sends me down the corridor to wait for Dr. Trum. He flexes my joints, listens to life in my chest, and consults numbers in my chart.

  “And you’re not going back on the AZT?” he inquires noncommittally.

  “No.”

  “Your numbers are going down. I’ll get your labs back from today and compare, but I think come winter we may start you on a pneumonia prophylaxis. Think you can handle that?”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  “It’ll lessen your chances of getting sick.”

  When I leave his office, I submit next to the orthopedist’s examination—he still expresses concern about my hip’s decline and admonishes me for failing to use a cane—and then done, I leave and park along Franklin Street, which never fails to interest me. The summer scholars cradle books while they await the trundling roar of the coming bus. Passersby pause before store windows and point to items they wish to own. An elderly florist sits in a small stretch of building shade, huddling round her garden of flowers—flashes of natural color in a concrete sea. And the jeweler toddles round the large black clock marking his store, roving his carefree head around and occasionally checking his own wristwatch for the time.

  At noon, the street lunches. The hot dog vendor fishes long slips of red wieners with his tongs, and he places these in steamed buns and dresses them with ketchup, mustard, onions, slaw, and chili. Nearby, patrons line the inside glass front of a small bistro and prop at undersized tables, taking petite bites of sandwiches made with breads of rye, sourdough, and sundried tomato.

  I enter the drugstore and lunch at the counter. On one side of me, a lady in a blue dress swirls a fry in a dab of ketchup. On the other side, a cop calls out to the cook and says that he made an arrest earlier, that it was a college basketball star, and that it would appear on the nightly news. The cook momentarily turns away from his grill of sizzling burgers, says, “No shit” to the cop, and then begins to flip the hamburgers one by one, soon setting them onto buns garnished with lettuce and tomato.

  “I’ll have one of those,” I say to the counter waitress. “No cheese. Fries. And a Coke to drink.” And when the food arrives, I eat, surrounded by smiling photographs of former patrons.

  Across the street is a record store, and when I’m finished eating, I go there, thumb through the new releases, finger the few bills in my pocket, and leave without a purchase. I stroll a few blocks west to enter a bookshop. The stacks tower over me with books whose tattered covers promise me the world. I loosen one from the shelf and unfold it to a page of faded ink. And before its printing, I think, it was the blue ink run from a pen and set down upon a sleeve of antique-laid paper, for this is how I imagine all writers work: with fountain pens, ink bottles, and thick paper. From the store window, light peeks down the aisle and shines upon the dust motes floating midair between James and Joyce. I run my finger along the hubbed spine of one, feel the antique luxury of leather, but pass on, buying instead a worn Graham Greene paperback.

  Outside in the sun again, I read the first paragraph. They are beautiful phrases, rhythmic and true. I linger at a table outside a coffee shop, drink caffeine, and imbibe the world in my hand. Nearby, a group of girls chatters, tossing their hair in fits of laughter. More girls invade the area. And they are all so beautiful with their blue and green and hazel eyes flaring in the sunlight. I stare at one in a pink top. She stares back. I smile. She smiles. My heart flutters.

  For money, I work at Fort Fisher: site of a famous Civil War battle and a place that beachgoers often stumble into when their sunburns are too great or when a downpour closes the beach. I give tours, answer questions, sell merchandise. Erected on the Cape Fear River’s mouth, this fort protected the South, guarded Wilmington, and shielded the Confederate troops inside its man-made sand mounds, which were built atop boxed wooden structures. Atop these mounds, soldiers placed lookouts and mounted cannons while they kept a fearful eye toward the river, the sea, and the Northern blockade. They constructed a ten-foot fence around them to guard against land invasion, and through the slats, they fired muskets at scavenging squirrels as practice targets for the coming battle. But all that is now gone. The fence is a reconstruction, and the sandy hills are overrun with a century of growth where Sandburg’s grass is, indeed, doing its work.

  Along the fort’s beach, live oaks arch backwards as if reaching their hands for the river behind them. Bent by endless ocean winds and low to the ground, their branches offer an easy perch where I have lunch, enjoying a quiet view of the sea while the salt breeze keeps the summer’s heat from scorching me. Down the slope of sand and onto the beach, the gentle lap of waves murmurs against a shore whose blood was born away more than a century before I was born.

  June. In the early evening when the colors soften and the heat cools and the day’s work has been done, I meet Dad at the Oceanic Pier. It is his first week of work in Wilmington, and, anxious to swim, he is there and already wet when I arrive.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t wait on me,” I say, approaching him.

  “It was too hot.” He stands to hug me. “I had to cool off.”

  I lay my towel next to his, remove my shirt and shoes.

  “I’m going in,” I say, striding down the ocean bank to the sea. Dad follows, and we wade out beyond the breakers, bobbing in salt water as the afternoon latens. We catch the occasional wave to shore, riding our inherited thin, flat chests as boards. And afterwards, we dry on our towels, the sun heating our backs as we stare toward the sea’s horizon.

  “How are you?” Dad asks, still gazing at the ocean and the fading day. He shakes a Marlboro from the pack, lights it. Smoke curls from his nicotine-yellowed hands, spews from his mouth and nose.

  “Fine,” I say. We don’t talk about HIV.

  “Job working out okay?”

  “Yes. I’m paying the bills at least.”

  “Mom and I will help out some, but it’s time you started learning to make your own way in the world. Next year’s the year.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Do you know what you’re gonna do?”

  “I’m figuring it out.” I run my hands along my legs, knocking off sand. I haven’t thought much about graduating from college, it still seeming far away, and long-term planning being anathema to HIV, so for now, I try to enjoy this summer. Life’s easier this way.

  “Well, don’t let it sneak up on you. You’re gonna need a good job. And you’re gonna need insurance.” Dad looks to me. “You can’t live without insurance, Son.”

  I nod that I understand. And I do. I’m just not ready for those concerns. Most fathers must talk to their sons like this, but his hammering of insurance scares me.

  Dad rubs a cigarette into the sand, taps his yellowed hands along thin damp legs while the shadows of our bodies stretch down the sloped embankment and almost to the water. The sun is low; the tide is high.

  “You coming home anytime soon?” Dad asks, breaking the sound of the waves and my thoughts in them.

  “Soon, yes. But not this weekend. There’s a birthday party for me. Maybe the next.”

  “Your mom misses you. She’s going to have a hard time with Anne leaving for college this year, too.”

  “I know, but my life is here. In Wilmington.” I brush a sandy hand on my towel.

  “I know, Son. It’s just a lot of changes for your mom at once. Me working out of town. Anne starting school. And you, not coming home for the summer. Go see her. You can ride with me one weekend.”

  “I will. I promise I will.”

  “Your mom wants to see you. She misses you.”

  We sit a while longer on our towels, letting the constant wind dry us. People stroll in front of us while the lights of the Oceanic begin to shine
more brightly and the restaurant bustles with diners eager for seafood. When the sky becomes its late-day violet, we scoop our towels from the beach, shake them off, and begin walking toward our cars.

  “How about the same time next week?” Dad asks.

  “As long as there’s no rain, that sounds great. It’s a perfect time for a swim, tourists gone and it not too hot.”