Death Trick - Stevenson Richard. Страница 44

I said, "You didn't touch it?"

"No. I guess I was already thinking, without even knowing I was. In fact, that's when I really started thinking. I thought, they'll think I did it, everybody will, and I'll go to prison again."

"Again?"

"Sewickley Oaks. It's all the same. Except maybe in real prisons they don't strap you down and zap you till you think you're going to fly apart—muscles and bones and brains exploding all over the ceilings and walls. Or maybe in the worst prisons that's what they do do, Attica or in the South."

"They did that? At Sewickley Oaks?"

With a look of the most intense loathing, he nodded once.

I said, "What happened next?"

"I—I got dressed and I walked out of the apartment, up Hudson."

"When you left the apartment, was the window screen in or out? It's a portable, adjustable screen. I've seen it. When you left, where was it? Try to remember."

He tried, but he couldn't.

"But the screen wasn't on the bed, or on the floor where you could see it?"

"No. I don't think it was. No."

"What about the apartment door—when you went out. Open or closed?"

"It was locked. From the inside. I had to turn the bolt."

"Then you walked up Hudson."

"As soon as I got outside, the unreality of it hit me again, and I thought no, he can't be dead, and I thought maybe I'd been wrong and he was really still alive. There was a phone booth just a couple of houses up, on the corner at Hudson and Dove, so I called the police—started to call, but I didn't know Steve's

address. I walked back to the apartment, memorized the address, and then went back and called. I said to go to the address, but I didn't say who I was."

"I know. It's on tape."

He grunted and shook his head. His T-shirt was soaked through with sweat, and droplets were now falling from his nose and chin.

"So you walked to Zimka's then? Up Hudson and through the park?"

"I knew I had to get out of Albany fast. I really didn't even understand what the fuck had happened, but I did know it was something horrible and I'd be blamed for it, and I had no choice but to run. No choice that I could see."

"And Zimka was home when you got there?"

"He was asleep. I had to bang on the door for—I don't know. A long time."

"How do you know he'd been asleep?"

Blount looked confused. "Because he said he was. He looked it. It was six in the morning. Did he tell you he wasn't?"

"No, he told me the same thing."

"But you don't believe it?"

"No. Maybe. I don't know."

"I don't get it. You keep saying suspicious things about Frank—you said he was in Trucky's parking lot that night when we left. Do you think Frank had something to do with— what happened?"

"Probably. It's not clear yet. Keep going. What happened next?"

"Frank borrowed a car and drove me to New York. I thought they might already be looking for me at the Albany airport, though I suppose they wouldn't have been watching that soon. Frank lent me the plane fare, and when I arrived out here, I called Kurt. I knew I could count on him, and I was right; he's been great. Look—what makes you think Frank is mixed up in this? Crazy old Frank. Frank is usually so whacked out he couldn't hurt a fly on downers."

I said, "Tell me about Frank. About you and Frank. Embarrassing or not, it's important that I know."

He looked away. "What's to tell? He's a trick—a friend I

trick with. I like him. He likes me. We get it off together."

"Jerk-off buddies? That's not the way Frank sees it. It's not the impression I get."

He looked at the wall and said nothing.

I said, "Eddie Storrs and Frank Zimka are the same person, aren't they?"

He sat there, his chest rising and falling, his face desolate—willfully empty, it seemed. He gave a choked laugh, then fell silent again. Finally, he looked at me and said, "No. They're not the same. Not really. The terrible truth is, there are two of them."

21

Billy blount and eddie storrs, blount told me, had been sixteen-year-old lovers at the Elwell School. Before then neither had known he was homosexual, just different somehow, and vaguely but deeply unhappy. In the presence of other male bodies, each had felt a disturbing, unresolvable tension whose source was unbeatable, baffling. The two sad, mystified boys became friends, and during a weekend visit to Eddie Storrs's home in Loudonville, they had been goofing off and ended up in the same bed—and it happened. Two weeks later they spent a weekend at the Blount home on State Street, and it happened again.

The two were terrified. At first they denied to themselves what was happening. They never spoke of it, tried not even to think of it, just did it. Then one night in Loudonville something snapped. Suddenly each professed his love for the other. They faced it, gave it a name, and let it pour out. The language they used was out of pop songs with half the pronouns transposed. It was explosive, glorious, liberating—and horrifying. In confronting their love, they also confronted something else: they were queer. A couple of cocksuckers. They were in love and mag-

ically happy—as at peace with themselves as they had been at war with themselves before—and at the same time they were frightened and wretched and ashamed of their true selves, which the other boys, and the world, would despise. They loved themselves and each other, and they despised themselves and, at times, each other.

Billy and Eddie contrived to meet in secret when they could—in the woods and fields around Lenox, in their parents' homes, in their own rooms at Elwell when their roommates were safely out on dates or off to hockey tournaments. Both boys' grades fell, and no one could explain why. When asked about this by their teachers and advisers or by their parents, both mumbled about how the curriculum "lacked relevance"— this was 1968—and the grown-ups shook their heads and muttered back about their keen desire to "establish a dialogue" with the boys. None, however, got established. You just did not tell people that you were a homo.

In fact, Billy and Eddie were spending most of their mental and physical energies on devising strategems for spending time alone with each other, and on the anxiety that resulted from their success with these ploys.

"This crazy life lasted for over a year," Billy Blount told me, "until the fall of our senior year, when the shit hit the fan. Some jerky kid from Danbury, Connecticut, caught us one Sunday night doing it on some mats stored under the gym bleachers. This kid never liked me; he was the type who smells a secret weakness in people, then baits you and tries to dig it out. When he caught us, I'd never seen such an evil, victorious smile on anyone's face. He walked straight over to the headmaster's house, and within three days our parents had been notified, and they came and got us. They told us that maybe we could go back to Elwell after we'd been 'cured.' We thought this was funny in a sorry kind of way, but we went along; we humored them. I mean, they were our parents. What did we know?

"The last time I saw Eddie was the day he left Elwell—I left the day after that. While our parents were with the headmaster and our roommates were in class, we shoved the desk against the door in my room and made love on my bed for the last time—what turned out to be the last time.

"As scared as we were, it was beautiful and very, very intense. It was one of the few times in my life when I've actually made love with a man, not just fucked with somebody for fun, or for connecting up with someone you like. We cried and held each other and said we'd love each other forever and ever, and no matter what happened we would find each other someday, and when that happened, we'd never let anyone come between us ever again.