I Should Be Laughing: Wyatt

Arctic air blasts, born in the Gulf of Alaska and, once fully formed, race down the flattened Pacific plane and slam into the jagged cliffs below the Seaton house, shaking the slate roof shingles and rattling the one-hundred-year-old windows. The rains arrived and brought with them the winds as well; a trickle in the night, a downpour at dawn. Droplets of water rushed in off the sea and angrily assaulted the windows like the sharpened fingernails of a demon. Those gunshots of rain against the glass reminded Wyatt of the Stephen King book he’d read as a boy, ‘Salems’s Lot; the one about the little boy vampire. Danny Glick, a little boy turned vampire who came rapping on his best friend’s bedroom window, begging to come inside so they could play.

Keeping his eyes tightly closed, and pulling the afghan up over his bare shoulders, Wyatt shuddered as he imagined that little boy’s vampire face outside the glass. His feet, covered in bulky sweat socks—the only thing he ever wore to bed on cold nights—curled beneath him as he remembered the horror novel. He had first read it at ten or so, and it had scared him to death; enough, anyway, for him to keep a cross next to the bed; not that he believed in vampires, but…. One night after he fell asleep, after he finished a chapter and put the book away, his sister crept from the house and came drumming her fingers on his window. He almost screamed that night, but, instead, gulped down the terror like the last bite of a truly awful meal because, as frightened as he was, as much as the book terrified him, letting his big sister know she scared him was the most horrifying thing ever. He could live down the book; he could not live that down.

Yet now, some twenty years later, with the wind pounding the loose shingles on the south wall of the house, and the rain scratching on the glass like Danny Glick, boy vampire, Wyatt was… smiling. Thinking about his sister and how she tried to frighten him, he was grinning. But the smirk was also a mask of nervousness, of being in this room, Harry’s old bedroom; of listening to the wind and rain pummel the house; of grains of sand pricking the glass; of sleeping in this ancient home surrounded by nowhere. Yes, most of all, it was the house that caused his uneasiness. All alone at the end of Skeleton Road, beyond the charred ruins of those other mansions, it was here, in this house, so far from anyone and everything, in the room across the hall, that Harry’s mother had taken her life. The house upset Wyatt, and turned his stomach, not little boy vampires in novels he’d read as a child.

Goose pimples tickled down his spine as he, after a long wait, opened his eyes to the bleakness of day. Lackluster light filtered through a narrow gap in the draperies and washed all color from the room. It was as if he had slept his way into a ‘40s melodrama; any minute Joan Crawford might come careening into the cheerless room, all shoulder pads and insults. Wyatt had been so tired the night before, from the drive and the stories Harry told of his family, his mother, after meeting Renny and Jimmy, that he had fallen into bed without once looking at the room, Harry’s old room.

Now, as the timid light encouraged him by scattering the images of cruel jokes and vampires, Wyatt looked around. He found walls covered in beige paper, the color of sand, above a dark band of cherry wainscoting and wood paneling. The room was full of simple furniture, practically Amish in its severity: a nondescript bureau, the drawers fronted by unadorned brass pulls, and a pair of matching night stands, each crowned with a simple lamp. Pleated shades over beige—more beige—ceramic bases, and a pair of chairs huddled near the wall, a small table covered with an ivory cloth in between.

Obviously someone had conveniently cleared the room of anything remotely Harry; no childhood pictures or games he used to play. No books. No posters of favorite bands; no records or stereo equipment. It might as well have been a room in some dingy inn along the coast that was rarely, if ever, rented, except by the hour. A second-rate print on the wall over the dresser, picturing a row of mailboxes along a country road, provided the only color in the room. Beige carpets and ivory drapes; stiff, heavy polyester that left both windows completely covered, save a narrow gap between the curtains. It disguised the sights and sounds of the storms brewing along the coast, both inside and out.

Flipping his legs out from beneath the covers—three heavy blankets and a tattered afghan—Wyatt propped his feet on the bed rail. Slung over the back of a chair, the one nearest him, underneath a window on the south side of the house where the clapboards and shingles still rattled and hummed in the wind and rain, were his flannel pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. He vaguely remembered tossing them there before he and Harry crawled into bed in Harry’s old room.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Wyatt peeled down his white gym socks and rubbed the ball of his right foot over the toes of his left, a morning ritual, along with the slight twist he gave to the silver ring on the second toe of his right foot. He had gotten the ring, and a few tattoos—Chinese characters for Compassion, Friendship, Peace and Truth—on a trip he and Harry had taken with John before he…. Wyatt grinned at the braided band of metal on his toe and the memory of that last vacation.

All of his life, and even more so in the last months of it, John wanted to go to Maui and ride down Haleakala. He wanted to watch the sun rise over the crater and then speed down the hill on a rented bicycle and end up at the beach; Harry was there to make John’s dream a reality. He was always there for John and, at first, Wyatt couldn’t understand why. He couldn’t figure out, given the beatings Harry endured, John’s theft and their painful breakup, what it was that the two men shared; what attached them to one another for life. It was only after he and Harry grew closer, that Wyatt began to see the simplicity of Harry and John’s relationship, and why it had lasted.

“See, Wyatt, he was the first man I ever loved, openly, the first to love me back,” Harry explained the night he and Wyatt returned from their first official date—a couple of years after they had met—to find a message from John on the answering machine; he wanted to know how it had gone. Wyatt realized that Harry was able to set aside his own fears and anger and, while not forgetting the pain John inflicted upon him, he at least could forgive him.  “That makes for a lifetime bond. No matter what happened between us, John was the first man to care about me, to let me be myself and to know that I was all right. I’ll always be there for John, and he’ll always be there for me.”