Martin and John by Dale Peck Page B

for a walk?” Martin pulled his arm from my body and rolled across the bed. “Where?” he said, sounding wide awake andwary already; I was still half-asleep and hadn’t thought about the question before asking it. “Swimming,” I said. This, too, just popped out. “So you mean, do I want to go swimming?” “Well, it’s a long walk there.” Martin jumped from bed. His tan legs and a yellow T-shirt, one of mine, made his underwear seem even more white. He grabbed a red shirt from the floor, a button-down, and put it on over the T-shirt. “Sure,” he said then, pulling on a pair of blue jeans. In the living room, my mother vacuumed underneath my father’s proppedup legs. His mouth was distended over a BLT and he watched a television made silent by the vacuum’s roar. My mother looked up as we walked by, still pushing the vacuum back and forth. “Where are you off to?” she called. “We’re going for a walk,” I said. “We’re going swimming,” Martin said at the same time. “What?” my mother said, her face confused. “Walking,” I said, and showed her with my hand, index and middle fingers striding an imaginary path. “Swimming,” Martin said, and pantomimed the act, one arm over the other. “What!” my mother yelled, her eyes wide and darting from me to Martin. My father pushed her out of the way of the TV with his leg. He yelled over the vacuum, “Get. But don’t forget your chores.” Quickly I pushed Martin outside, and my mother’s final protest—“But they didn’t eat”—was cut off by the closing door.
    The sound of an approaching car overtook us on the road. When Martin heard it, he stopped. He turned and looked at the car, and when it got a little closer he pushed me back afoot so he could see it, and be seen by it, clearly. I started to ask him what was up, but he cut me off. “Just try to disappear for a sec, okay?” When the car was about fifty feet away, he posed himself. There’s no other word for it. He stood with his legs spread wide, pants pulled up tight in the crotch, pelvis pushed forward. His shoulders were thrown back and the button-down rode low on them, flapping like a cape, and with his right hand he pushed up his T-shirt so that a taut line of bare stomach was exposed. At the last minute, he pushed his bangs over his left eye. The car was big and old and rust-eaten, and it came up on us fast, and then, I’m not sure, but I think it was just as Martin pulled up his shirt, it slowed down with a short screech of dry brake pads, and at the sound I was moved as I had been so many times in the past few days behind another person’s eyes, this time the eyes of the old man driving the car. And there was Martin: he looked like a—I was going to say he looked like a prostitute, but who ever heard of a boy prostitute? And there I was: head down, hands in pockets, looking like—the car suddenly sped up and passed us in a cloud of dust. When it disappeared over a slope Martin started walking again. “What was that?” I asked. “An experiment.” “Did it succeed or fail?” “Both,” Martin said, and though I didn’t feel he’d told me anything really, the way he said it made me decide not to ask another question.
    Then we were tramping across the fields, my feet sweating inside my boots. Martin looked more comfortable in my sneakers. He’d been wearing penny loafers when I found him,but they’re useless for trekking. Eventually the land grew boggy and started to sink in on itself and I said, “We’re almost there.” In the distance a darker spot of brown gradually revealed itself to be a small pond. The pond was surrounded by a long lazy half-moon of limestone, a twenty-foot-high strip pocked by small black caves that glowed white in the distance and served as a narrow border between the brown grass and the blue sky. But it was the pond in the center of this canyon that held my eye. Coffee-colored, it bristled at the edges with tangled junipers and the