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TRAGEDY IN THE BLOOD by Steven H. Davis
Chapter 42
*Everybody holds their breath/
As he passes by the horns of death*
I stood in front of the arcade, clutching my black leather jacket tightly to my chest, the large kitchen butcher's knife pressed firmly against my body.
It was 6:55 pm.
The arcade was in a strip mall right around the corner from my street. There was a realty office, a flower store, a laundromat, and the arcade, with a small parking lot on a slope leading down to Montgomery Road, which wound up to the H.E.B. grocery store a few blocks away before merging with Walzem Road. Polk High was about a half-mile north.
Across from the strip mall were houses, and -- as I looked to my right, about half a block down -- a small concrete path leading to another of the endless prefab developments dotting the northeast side of San Antonio.
As I looked at the path, I saw Nathan walking toward Montgomery.
*And the crowd jumps to its feet to roar/
For the Matador*
He was a formidable figure, tall and lean with a blue denim jacket over a plain black t-shirt. He wore his usual tight, sky blue boot-cut jeans and fashionably weathered cowboy boots. His roach-killers clomped on the pavement as he strode purposefully across the road, his large metal belt making audible clanking noises as he moved closer. My hand instinctively reached inside my jacket, just to make sure the knife was there.
It was.
*With the scarlet cape against his hips/
And 'Ay, Toro' whispered from his lips*
I studied Nathan as he approached. He was an incredibly attractive boy, I realized. Coltish and aggressive, a young buck with only two purposes in life: fucking and fighting.
Just for a moment, I was unsure which one of those two options I would have preferred.
He caught sight of me, his golden feathered hair bouncing slightly as he walked. He smirked, and those beady eyes dialed in on me until I felt like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck.
Finally, he reached the arcade. Without further ado, he stripped off his jacket, tossing it across the top of a nearby trash can.
His tanned, muscular biceps flexed. His chest and abdomen rippled beneath his tight black t-shirt. I found my gaze suddenly riveted to the almost obscenely-large bulge beneath the aggressively blatant metal buckle.
And, for a moment, I completely forgot why I was there.
*And inside my heart is beating for/
The Matador*
"Let's do this," he said gruffly.
He flexed his powerful arms again and beckoned to me with his large hands, the universal symbol for "come at me, bro."
I took note of his long, thick fingers and began to wonder what they signified. I felt as if I could almost smell him, an intoxicatingly musky blend of teenage pheromones containing both sex and aggression.
*As I watch his body turn and twist/
He doesn't know that I exist/
Though I've shared so many dreams before/
With the matador*
I nodded at him, my eyes never leaving his, and slowly slid the large butcher knife from my jacket, clutching the handle as if I was Michael Myers from Halloween, one of my favorite horror films of the time.
My lip was quivering. I was shaking, angry and afraid and strangely aroused all at the same time. I was ready for blood. I was ready to slash that shirt from his muscular torso. I was ready to slice and cut at those sprayed-on jeans until they fell away to reveal... what? A great, big, hairy, smelly teenage dick. Just what I wanted at that moment.
The love of my life, the sweet angel whom I pictured waking up with every morning forever... my Babes... was gone.
GONE!
Taine was gone, with no warning, no reason, just gone, vanished from my life!
All I wanted at that moment was to slice and hack the clothes off this brute, this barbaric shit-kicker, and have him standing there, bronzed, naked, bleeding, his cock engorged and huge, and have him somehow... somehow... fuck the pain away.
I looked at Nathan, the butcher knife raised in my clenched, white-knuckled fist, and I saw something in those beady eyes that I had never seen before. Softness. Compassion. Pity.
*Tonight we'll meet beneath the silver stars/
Dance to mandolins and soft guitars/
I dream I give my love once more/
To the matador/
To the matador!*
I lowered the knife, that comically large suburban housewife's chopping friend, and burst into tears.
Nathan frowned, backed up a step or two, and then burst out laughing as I imagine he had never laughed before.
He grabbed his jacket from the trash can, slung it rakishly over his shoulder, and approached me slowly, tenderly. He took the knife from my trembling hand and dropped it into the trash. Then he threw an arm casually around my heaving, sobbing shoulders.
"Come on," he said. "Let's go to my house. It's just over there."
*And as he leaves the ring they cheer/
Sombreros fly into the air/
And I throw the crimson rose I wore/
To the matador*
Nathan's house was right next to the end of that path to Montgomery, separated only by a ratty wooden fence with a space in it to allow us to pass. It was a typical suburban home: Dad's beige Buick in the driveway, fancy sitting room up front with plastic-covered furniture, just like my house.
His parents were welcoming and friendly.
His dad, Bob, was the local Episcopalian minister, his face round and pleasant with wire-framed, studious-looking glasses and the remnants of black hair, which were assiduously combed over the large bald expanse of his head in a manner which was charming rather than silly.
His mother, Verna, was right out of the 1950s. She wore a heavily-starched pastel blue dress, with a white lacey apron. I tried to place her face for a moment, because it seemed incredibly familiar to me. Finally it clicked, and the reason that it took me a while was that she was in color, and I remembered the face in black-and-white. She was a dead ringer for Jane Wyatt, the mother in Father Knows Best.
Nathan had a 12-year old sister as well, Gretchen, who was a tomboy and completely enraptured with the country singer Louise Mandrell. Small, freckled and pigtailed in a checkered shirt and old-school dungarees, I was absolutely positive that Nathan had a budding young lesbian in the house.
After all the appropriate introductions had been made, Nathan gestured me down the hall from the well-appointed dining room to his room. Or should I say, "cave".
Nathan's room looked like a bomb had gone off. His bed was disheveled, there were stacks of magazines -- Creem, Soldier of Fortune, Guns & Ammo, High Times -- everywhere. There was a Mountain Dew can by the bed filled with expectorate from Norman's habit of "dipping" smokeless tobacco, Skoal or Copenhagen.
I sat on his bed and looked behind me to see a hole in the wall covered with what looked like maggoty shit.
"What the hell is that?" I asked, as tears dried on my cheeks.
Nathan flopped down in a grizzled office chair opposite me and grinned.
"Terry came up with this brilliant idea," he said. "We cooked up some rice and didn't have anything else to eat with it, so the little fucker decided we should mix it with peanut butter. We were both stoned as fuck, so we did it. I took one bite... one goddamn bite... and chucked my bowl into the wall just as hard as I could. I keep it there as... kind of a memorial."
I nodded, although I thought that letting peanut butter and rice rot on your wall just above your bed was the craziest thing I had ever heard.
My eyes wandered across his walls. Posters of Cheryl Tiegs, Judas Priest, some hunter holding the largest automatic weapon I had ever seen, a High Times centerfold of some strain of pot called "Nicaraguan Red"...
And then my eyes lighted on a sheet of notebook paper Scotch-taped to the wall right over his pillow. It was a highly- detailed drawing, in fine-tip blue marker, of a man. The man had dark jeans, a white t-shirt with a swastika on it, and held up his right hand giving the Devil's horn sign.
The tip of the marker had been so fine that I could make out hundreds of individual lines, and the picture must have taken hours and hours to render.
The face was the scary part. The face was that of a bearded man with devilish mustache and goatee. His face seemed to hold dozens of small wrinkles, and his eyes burned right through me as I studied the drawing. The eyebrows were arched, but heavy. The hair was wild, and every hair was individually drawn.
There was a swastika in the middle of the man's forehead, and I knew who he was immediately. I had read a book about him when I was eleven, picked up from a used bookstore in Surfside Beach, South Carolina for the princely sum of seventy-five cents. He became a life-long obsession.
Had I wondered, had I disputed Nathan's drawing skills, the picture gave me ample clues. To the right of the fiercely- staring man's head was written "HELTER SKELTER!" To the left, in painstaking Gothic font, was written "CHARLIE MANSON IS MY NAME!"
I began to think back on the book I had read. The horrible murders of August 8th and 9th, 1969. The mad, murderous guru who had sent out an army of drugged, sex-addled young zombies from the fires of Hell at an abandoned movie ranch in California with one goal in mind: complete annihilation of the ruling class. The upper crust. The "pigs".
I thought of the images that book had spawned in my young mind. Of a Texas track star, completely overwrought with speed and evil, standing in the living room of 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, in the hills over Los Angeles, looking at sleepy, frightened houseguests of a beautiful, very pregnant movie star and announcing, "I am the Devil. And I'm here to do the Devil's business."
My eyes turned back to Nathan. He was reclining in the office chair, his long, muscular legs spread wide, offering me a view of what looked like a large adult guinea-pig stuffed in the crotch of his jeans. He was looking at me.
And smiling.
Chapter 43
Nathan and I became fast friends, and it's hard to say exactly why. Surely, as I pored through his Soldier of Fortune magazines looking at the ads for mercenaries in the back, his High Times and Easyriders with their garish centerfolds of exotic strains of marijuana and barely-dressed tattooed biker mommas, it wasn't that we had a lot in common. Well, other than Charlie Manson and my newly-discovered passion for heavy metal music.
In the beginning, I suppose, it was because I was feeling sad and forlorn and just needed a masculine straight friend to get my mind off blubbering over Taine. Someone who wouldn't let me talk about what was on my mind even if I wanted to. It was also, of course, because Nathan was hotter than hell and seemed to get off on the fact that he so obviously impressed me on a basic, primal level. I tried to hide it, but I'm sure he knew.
Nothing sexual ever happened between Nathan and I while we were attending Polk High School. There was always an electric charge, however, even though we would distract ourselves for the next four years in his (and, to be fair, my own) endless quest for pussy. My heart was broken, permanently, but I was still a teenager and a slave to my hormones.
I think, on Nathan's side, it was partly a by-product of his self-segregation from the rest of the Polk student body. Sure, he fancied himself a badass, and he was, but he really didn't have a close friend other than Terry, whom he obviously didn't respect and only kept around for laughs.
With me it was something different. We really talked together, shared our hopes and fears and dreams. Not at first, of course, but eventually he opened up to me as I'm sure he had never opened up to anyone before. Because he knew I cared, and would keep his counsel, and... Well, I think he could sense that I viewed him a lot differently than any of the other male students did.
As far as opening up to a girl, well, Nathan could never respect any "piece of ass" enough to trust her with his confidences. I was a guy, we did guy things together, and I think he was fascinated with both my intellect and my obvious attraction to him. He wouldn't acknowledge it verbally, but if that wasn't there, I'm not sure that he would have befriended me, and certainly not as closely as he did.
To him, I think I was the best of both worlds, and two years after we graduated from high school, in 1986, we finally crossed that rubicon, and spent a long, passionate week of exploring our long-repressed feelings in my apartment in Washington DC. I saw him once more after that, in 1989, but he was different toward me. Remote. As if it had been that electric charge all along, and after it had been released, there was nothing to say anymore.
We never spoke again.
But 1989 was still eight years away on that day in the fall of my freshman year, and by the time that I left Nathan's house -- after enjoying a family meal worthy of an old Norman Rockwell painting -- I knew that we would be friends. As I thanked his parents and went to the door, Nathan took me by the wrist, holding up my arm to examine the bandages from where he had sliced it with his belt-buckle knife.
"You better keep changing this bandage," he said. "If it gets infected and they have to cut off your hand, I'm not going to hang around with you. Stumpy dudes keep the pussy away."
That was as close as I ever got to having him apologize for what he did, but I didn't really care by then -- he had just basically implied that he wanted to hang out with me, after all -- and returned his strange, off-kilter grin.
"Stumpy dudes," I retorted, "can do things to women you can't possibly imagine."
We laughed, and then I was on my way home.
Of course, I went by the empty former house of Taine Maxwell on the way, and of course I stood there for a few minutes sobbing.
Of course I did.
How could he have just left without a word? Hadn't he just invited me to go camping with him and Blaine at Big Bend? Or was that just a ruse, a distraction so that I wouldn't have picked up any tell-tale signs of his impending departure?
Why, I wondered in vain, would Taine do something like this?
I had no idea.
When I got home, I heard barking, and there she was: the cutest little long-haired dachshund that I had ever seen. She looked at me with big, scared brown eyes, sat down on the kitchen floor with her tail wagging so fast it was almost blurring, and rolled over onto her back, then urinated all over herself.
"Oh, Heidi!" wailed Tynah, rushing to the site of the spillage with a roll of paper towels. She knelt next to the still furiously-wagging dog, wiped up the mess, then looked up at my confused face. "She was abused."
I nodded, still unsure as to what the hell was happening, and gingerly knelt down to let the frightened Heidi smell my hand. She cowered for only a moment before licking my fingers, which I guessed meant that she thought I was okay.
Tynah explained to me that one of the female soldiers on-base had tried to keep Heidi in the barracks, which was strictly against the rules. Whenever a superior came in, the woman would shove the poor puppy into a drawer or even into her footlocker, where she would cower in fear, not daring to make a sound. On the few occasions that she had made a sound, this stupid bitch would hit Heidi to shut her up.
"I can't believe anyone would do that to a poor baby puppy, Rick," Tynah said, with obvious pain and compassion in her eyes. "Can you?"
"No," I said. "I don't even know that woman and I'd like to smack her and lock her in a trunk."
Tynah nodded gravely.
I looked down into Heidi's adorable little face as she kept snuffling and licking around my hand, her tail still hammering the kitchen floor.
"You're safe now, little girlie," I told her, and Heidi seemed to understand.
Of course, had that sweet little dachsie known that the last dog we took in had been brutally and savagely gutted in the back yard hammock, she might not have been so anxious to join the Spivey family.
Hopefully, what Heidi didn't know wouldn't hurt her.
After Tynah took Heidi to her bedroom and Rex had fallen asleep on his floor-pillow in the living room, after I had made a feeble attempt at my homework and given up while still in the process of soaking it with tears, it was time for the cold hand of insomnia to revisit me for another long and despairing dark night of the soul.
*You sheltered me from harm/
Kept me warm, kept me warm/
You gave my life to me/
Set me free, set me free*
After a bit of fighting against it, trying to cry myself to sleep to no avail, I got dressed, grabbed my Walkman, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and went out onto the backyard patio. I was sad, yes. Hurt. Broken-hearted. All those things. But the reason I couldn't sleep was that I didn't have an answer to that most fundamental of questions:
Why?
*The finest years I ever knew/
Were all the years I had with you*
"It wasn't even years," I answered the song bitterly. "Only a few damn weeks. Only a few weeks in my fucking life I could be happy. Only a few weeks."
*And I would give anything I own/
Would give up my life, my heart, my home*
What could possibly have made them all just leave like that? Without a word, without a clue, without a fucking note?
*I would give everything I own/
Just to have you back again*
I sat there for a moment, roiling with emotions. Anger, sadness, fear, pain, confusion, yearning, betrayal, loss, abandonment, everything... everything bad and cold and dark and sad... How could I have gone through so much crazy shit in my life, survived everything and finally found love, only to have it so cruelly and mysteriously taken away from me?
*You taught me how to love/
What it's of, what it's of*
But, at the center of that black maelstrom of emotions was still one pure, burning love for the boy whose absence had occasioned them. The love of my life. My angel. My Babes. My sweet, sweet Babes.
*You never said too much/
But still you showed the way/
And I knew from watching you*
Taine Maxwell taught me something that I was sure I would never learn. He taught me how to love another human being fully, completely, unconditionally.
*Nobody else could ever know/
The part of me that can't let go*
And then he was gone. Just like that, he was gone. Like my dad, my mom, my dog, my friends at so many schools I'd left behind, all gone. But losing Taine hurt the worst, because I had no answers for it. Just emptiness and pain.
*And I would give anything I own/
Would give up my life, my heart, my home*
I sat at the picnic table, smoking my cigarette and wishing for Taine. I sat there for a long time, just staring at the stars up in that immense, vast South Texas sky and wondering if I would ever see my Babes again. If I would ever smell the faint, heartbreakingly sweet scent of strawberry shampoo in his silken hair. If I would ever see those eyes that knew my every thought and fear so well. If I would ever live long enough to once more taste those perfect lips on mine.
*I would give everything I own/
Just to have you back again*
"Where are you, my angel?" I said aloud. "Where are you? Why did you leave me all alone in the world again? Why? Why?"
Tears streamed down my face, and I was shaking too hard to even hold the stub of my cigarette, which had burned down to a long grey ash which felt like my heart. I dropped it to the ground and wandered aimlessly around the yard, listening to the song and aching.
*Is there someone you know/
You're loving them so/
But taking them all for granted*
Just aching.
*You may lose them one day/
Someone takes them away/
And they don't hear the words you long to say*
It was after two in the morning before I finally wandered back inside, and although I still didn't sleep, the maelstrom of dark emotions had subsided, and all that was left was love. That was all there would ever be in my heart again, I knew. Just love for Taine.
Wherever he was.
*I would give anything I own/
Would give up my life, my heart, my home/
I would give everything I own/
Just to have you...... back again/
Just to touch you once again/
Just to have you back again*
Thank you for reading Chapters 42 & 43. To be continued...
"The Matador" written by Don Pfrimmer and Bob Morris. Performed by Sylvia. c 1981 by RCA Records. "Everything I Own" written by David Gates. Performed by Bread. c 1972 by Elektra Records. Paraphrased sections of "Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders." by Vincent T. Bugliosi with Curt Gentry. c 1974 by W.W. Norton and Company.
Once again, I'm always happy to hear from readers at DJAkeeba@aol.com. You have all been so supportive and encouraging, and I thank you all for your e-mails.
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