Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 3.

Faggot like the rest of us.

Thanks for being coming back for another installment of concerning antics. Same time next week?

Chapter 3. Faggot like the rest of us.

Though he’s well prepared for the distant future, each day comes as a surprise to Marshall. When he wakes up the next day and finds Beaver asleep on the couch because he killed the kid’s dad the day prior and kidnapped him from his addict mother, he’s struck with the fear of not knowing how he got here or where to go next. He wasn’t supposed to get attached. He wasn’t supposed to alter a life beyond the taking of one.

Beaver’s stomach rumbles in his softly sleeping body and Marshall sets a frying pan on the stove. He pours pancake mix into a bowl with milk and eggs, beats it with a whisk until homogenous. The pale sludge sizzles as it hits the pan. He pulls apart strips of bacon and lays them around the edges of the hardening disc of cake–he likes the grease. He watches the tiny bubbles rise through the pancake and pop, releasing air. The scent of breakfast or the sizzling of meat stirs Beaver from his rest. He watches Marshall cook in silence. They eat and listen to Elvis on a cassette player and once he’s cleaned his plate and licked his fingers, Beaver asks, “What are we gonna do today?”

What are they gonna do today? Marshall has to work, something he hadn’t considered when kidnapping a child. He doesn’t trust his neighbors. His mom could come home at any time in a weird mood and do something mean. He can’t leave the kid alone. Can you leave a thirteen year old alone? Marshall had spent much of his childhood alone but he knows that this is not a proportionate yardstick by which to measure raising a kid. Why did he take this child?

Marshall dresses in his work clothes, Beaver in a big striped tee and baggy pants. Marshall offers him several hat alternatives but he prefers the pot even though it gets hot in the late summer sun and makes sweat freely flow from his tough scalp.

They ride his bike down to the Quik-Mart and Marshall breathes a sigh of relief to find that Jamie is behind the register like he always is. He looks so bored and pretty and stoic, Marshall has to adjust his crotch before going inside. He pretends to shop for a few minutes, aware of the peering eyes on his back then approaches the counter with nothing in his hands.

“Hi,” he says. “I need a favor.”

Jamie looks from Marshall to Beaver then back to Marshall again. His eyes ask the question, brow arching up high into the real estate of his forehead. Some days Jamie doesn’t mind talking, sometimes even uses whole sentences but most days, like today, he keeps his pretty lips sealed tight and uses his face to drag meaning to the surface. Marshall has observed him a lot, too much probably, but he’s never found any rhyme or reason to Jamie’s days of selective mutism. All he knows is Jamie has been like this since they first met in elementary school and he’s never questioned the reason, only what he has to do to gain access to the beautiful boy’s inner world. A few months ago, he saw Dora attempting sign language with him–they were learning together. Marshall rode his bike down to the public library where he’s been a long time card holder and checked out the first book he could find on American Sign Language. He’s been learning slowly. What he really dreamed of though was the two of them building their own language together. A series of gestures, touch, a glance, morse code kisses that strung together would reveal layers of intention and feeling inexplicable through spoken language. He wouldn’t even know how to go about that. He imagines they would have to be boyfriends first and that doesn’t seem likely given the scared, guarded way that Jamie is always eyeing him, even now.

“I need you to watch this kid for me,” Marshall says evenly. He’s noticed that other people seem to whisper around Jamie like they’re scared of startling him and Jamie is always cupping his ear with a soft brown hand or leaning closer but they never seem to take the hint that his silence does not hinder his auditory processing. Marshall speaks so Jamie can hear him and imagines that if he’s lucky someday Jamie will lean in close only because he wants to be closer, wants to hear more.

Marshall lifts Beaver up and places him on the counter like he’s a baby or a chocolate bar. “This is Beaver or John. He doesn’t really care what you call him. I’m responsible for the kid now but I gotta go to work and I can’t leave him alone in the trailer park. Can you watch him for me? Six hours tops.”

Jamie scratches the back of his head, checks his watch, taps on the register’s screen. Marshall can hear two of Jamie’s younger sisters laughing in the back somewhere.

Jamie nods hesitantly and relief floods Marshall’s gut which has been twisted into knots since he took a sharp blade to man’s throat the day before.

Under most circumstances Marshall would like to kiss Jamie on the mouth but especially right now. Feeling bold and freed of the anxiety that has been sinking his boots into the earth, he reaches across the counter and squeezes Jamie’s shoulder sort of awkwardly and only for a moment but even this small sensation of closeness makes his heart race.

He turns to Beaver so he doesn’t have to see Jamie’s reaction. “Alright now, this is my good friend Jamie. He doesn’t talk much so don’t be a dick about it and don’t take anything without asking, got it?”

Beaver nods. “Yes, sir.”

Marshall frowns. “Nuh-uh. You call me Marshall or buddy or big guy or whatever nickname you can think up but don’t call me sir. Mindless obedience is for people who believe in the government. Make sense?”

Beaver nods again, obedient. “Okay. Thanks, Marshall.”

“Good man,” he says, rapping his knuckles against the scratched up helmet. “Don’t worry about the pot,” he says to Jamie. “He likes it.”

As he turns to leave, he feels a ghost following him out the door in the shape of a soft grin on a pretty face that he may or may not have imagined into existence. The ghost takes up residence in his chest but leaves his lungs room to take deep, sweet breaths.

---

The workday drags him through the sweltering heat and the unyielding earth. Time seems to move slow and thick with an indignance, like it knows he’s got somewhere he’d rather be and wants to remind him how little time he actually owns. It seems to Marshall like time can do cartwheels and backflips and run around in zig zags when he’s trying to outpace the present.

Police sirens roar by the lawn they’re manicuring but he pays them no mind. It seems there are always police cars racing, fires raging, people dying where death should not be able to touch. The orchestra of societal collapse sounds a lot like the vehicles that are supposed to save people driving in the wrong direction. He eyes his backpack zipped tight in the back of the landscaping van.

They’re working hard today. August is the last month before fall rolls in and begins to steamroll their hard work with the wide hips of Mother Nature. He and the guys he works with never begrudge the changing of the seasons the way their clients do in their feverish desire to control every last aspect of their lives and their surroundings. All their clients can see is beauty wilting, property value plummeting, but these men browning out in the heat see the world turning like it’s supposed to, like it always has, another year they’ve survived despite the constant financial strain, the absence of health insurance, rents rising because a landlord thought of a higher number. It’s a small victory to live another day when each one is so uncertain.

There’s a sense of community and support amongst the men too, if a fragile and guarded support. Just as the landscaping season is winding down, the boys start sharing the jobs they’ve got or don’t got lined up for the cold months. Ricky, who is a distant cousin of Jamie's, works a bar downtown and can usually get Marshall a barbacking gig for a bit. Gino drives trucks and knows all the stores hiring at their loading docks. Julien does Doordash and hates it, doesn’t recommend. 

The men were wary of Marshall when he started with them a few years back. All the guys are of some Latin descent, mostly Dominican, Honduran, Puerto Rican and they weren’t necessarily inclined to welcome the white guy joining their ranks and Marshall was not interested in touting his distant indigenous roots to gain points with men who have been displaced by his European colonial ancestors over and over again since the invention of white history. But then there was the night he got the call to come pick up his mother from the bar, the one where all the guys go to drink after work so they saw him peeling her off the floor, and once they’d made the connection from Marshall to Elaine to the dead father, they got the whole gist that he wasn’t much better off than any of them were and they could welcome him from a place of class solidarity. Now they call him gringo affectionately and he’s picked up a good deal of Spanish and sometimes they invite him over for big cookouts with their families in tiny backyards.

Marshall doesn’t exactly feel at home with these men and their kinship but he doesn’t feel displaced either. Today, he can’t join them in their banter the way he normally would, tossing jokes and observations over his shoulder in a language that has made a comfortable home in his mouth. He’s got his mind on a kid who needs his care and a man who’s been dead for less than a day at the bottom of a hill.

He’s not worried, really. He never worries about getting caught and that feels like the key. No worry, nothing can go wrong. But still, he gets the feeling that he’s missing something.

When Marshall gets back to the Quik-Mart thirty minutes later than he said he would, Jamie is still glued to the floor behind the register and Beaver is nowhere in sight. Jamie jerks a thumb toward the open door to the backroom.

Beaver is sat at the tiny round break table eating Cheez-Its from the bag while Jamie’s younger sister Carolina takes a thick paintbrush to Beaver’s helmet. Carolina has Jamie’s face in a much smaller form with lots of thick dark hair framing her round face. She’s very concentrated as she curves and wiggles the brush across the faded metal, pink tongue slipping from the corner of her mouth.

“You ask for that first?” Marshall says by way of greeting.

“Hey,” Beaver says. “Yeah, I did.”

“Good man. Hi, Carolina.”

“Hi, Hulk,” she says without looking. The painting is really important to her.

Beaver grins wide. “Can I call you Hulk?”

“Sure. I still suggest you come up with your own nickname, too. Makes it real special. You have fun today?”

The kid shrugs. “Yeah, I guess so. Jamie is nice.”

Carolina makes a disgusted face even though she adores her brother. She must be the same age as Beaver or at least close, the age where a kid learns about contradictions and how interesting they feel to adopt as a mode of being. “Jamie is boring,” she says. “Everything here is boring.”

“Think you can finish your painting tomorrow, Lean Bean? I gotta get this kid home.”

She nods and Beaver gathers his stuff and the kids say goodbye and see you tomorrow like they’ve already been friends for weeks. Marshall smiles at Jamie on the way out and his face doesn’t change much but he can tell Jamie has silently agreed to watch his big weird friend’s new adopted child again tomorrow. It’s all in his eyes.

---

Marshall makes tacos for dinner. He’s only got beef and sliced cheese torn to bits but Beaver doesn’t complain. They’re watching the nightly news with Lester Holt. A bunch of stuff is on fire or underwater and lots of people died. Some guy is missing. Lester is grim and brow-creased about it all

“Were you ever honest with your parents?” Marshall asks, mouthful of steaming beef and tortilla.

Carolina had painted most of a purple flower on top of Beaver’s helmet. It’s surprisingly detailed with a white center and little flecks of golden pollen, creases in the petals, impressive shading work.

“I guess so,” Beaver says. “Ma never asks me much. Pa asked me stuff all the time but the answer was never right and he’d just hit me no matter what so I usually just told the truth.”

Marshall considers this. “You miss your ma,” he says.

“Yeah. But I don’t wanna see her while she’s high. That means I’m down low and she can’t see me.”

Marshall sighs. “Anybody ever tell you you’re too smart for your age?”

“Yeah. I just know the stuff I know.”

“That you do.”

Marshall cleans up while the weather is forecasted to be unprecedented again. How many more precedents can possibly be set? Is the world moving toward infinity? What happens when it gets there? The precedent hasn’t been set yet.

Something makes Marshall triple check the locks before he tucks Beaver in on the couch with a fuzzy blanket and an old stuffed animal of his, a panda bear shaped very spherically. Each night now, the kid trades his helmet for Marshall’s big beanie. Only in sleep.

“I’m sorry you're stuck with me,” Beaver says with only a bit of self pity.

“Stuck like a fat pig in a bog,” Marshall replies. “Sorry I had to kill your pa, and your mama’s too fucked to raise you.”

“Fucked like a penguin up in the sky,” he agrees.

Marshall can’t help but smile. He supposes he’s raising a child now and that’s just the way it is. Kid’s not an idiot. He can do most of the work himself, already has been.

“You’re gonna be alright, John,” he says. “Night.”

“Night, Hulk.”

They sleep like painted rocks. The world turns for another night.

---

A week passes like that. Marshall’s mom hasn’t come home so Beaver sleeps on the couch and Marshall rests in his bed. They have a big breakfast each morning and Marshall drops off his kid at a daycare that also happens to be a convenience store on a corner and after work he collects the kid and they watch TV until bed. Sirens rush in a dozen directions all day long but none of them find a dead man in the woods behind his own house.

Each day as he deposits Beaver at the Quik-Mart he forces himself to try talking to Jamie in full sentences that have meaning.

“Hey,” he said on Tuesday. “You remember being a kid?”

Jamie had nodded and snapped a rubber band against his wrist.

“Me too,” Marshall said. Then he left.

On Wednesday, he bought some toilet paper, the kind with the cartoon bears on the packaging and he said, “Don’t you think it’s funny how we make a kind of paper that’s only use is for wiping our asses and flushing?”

Jamie shrugged and cracked his neck.

“Yeah,” Marshall agreed. “I guess we make paper for lots of specific stuff.”

Thursday was Marshall’s day off but he went by the Quik-Mart anyway under the guise of letting Jamie know that he didn’t have to watch a random kid today but Jamie wasn’t there. Dora was at the register, snapping gum at an alarming pace. Her and Beaver had apparently developed some kind of intricate handshake over the past week which they demonstrated for Marshall. He was genuinely impressed. Carolina and the youngest sister, Mirabel, were stocking the shelves. Marshall had never seen their parents working the store before. He bought a Hershey bar and fed it to Beaver. On the white belly of the wrapper, he scribbled a hasty note to leave for Jamie but instead of handing it to Dora he threw it in the trash on the way out.

On Friday, Marshall put his elbows on the cold laminate counter, prepared to tell a really bad joke or make a weird observation but Jamie spoke first.

“You going to Lana’s tonight?”

The sound of Jamie’s voice after so many days of silence made Marshall’s heart stutter. He felt guilty about his excitement but he really does love Jamie’s voice, deep and smooth like clover honey, the intent behind every word clear and precise because of how important the words are to him.

Marshall shrugged. “I’ve got a kid now. So.”

Jamie called out to the backroom, “Beaver, you wanna party?”

Beaver’s distant body called back, “Yeah.”

Jamie turned back to him. “You going to Lana’s tonight?”

“Sure as a piece of pie,” he said with a tilt of the cowboy hat he was wearing for some reason.

“What?” Jamie asked.

“I’ll be there. You?”

He nodded. “Later, cowboy.”

Marshall has been riding the high of that short interaction all day long. He’s been working harder than normal, humming a working tune like one of those little guys from the princess movie. The other guys think he got laid last night but this is better than sex. Jamie spoke to him.

The story goes like this: Marshall actually met Isadora before he met Jamie, or rather he met Jamie because of Isadora, but if you ask Marshall, time isn’t linear anyway and he met Jamie more than a hundred times as a thousand different selves. For the purposes of this story, let’s pretend that time moves as you grow and the past is the past. It was second grade in the cafeteria and Marshall already knew that he hated school and eating lunch with people he didn’t know. Dora was of a similar mindset and so they’d gravitated blindly toward each other without intention and without noticing so that one day they looked up and realized they’d been eating together for weeks without exchanging any words.

They looked the way that they looked–Dora with her beaded pigtails and overalls, Marshall with his unfortunate bowl cut and secondhand clothes, big to his small. When the boy appeared in front of their table, struggling to look in any particular direction, Marshall thought there was no way this kid had been in the same school as him the whole time. His hair was buzzed much like it is now but he had a longer bit at the hairline and the tips were dyed blonde. He even had a tiny gold ring in his eight year old ear.

“What do you want?” Dora asked. Those were the first words Marshall had heard from her small, pursed lips and he hadn’t expected her voice to come out so harsh or cruel.

Jamie’s lips had opened but nothing came out. He looked over his shoulder and sort of widened his eyes. Marshall didn’t know what was happening but he was mesmerized, a child discovering there are ways to communicate that don’t involve the futility of spoken word.

“Then go if you have to go,” Dora hurled coldly, already returning to her food so she wouldn’t have to see the feelings that poured from every tiny curve of his lips, every wrinkle in his forehead. “We don’t have to do everything together.”

Jamie and Dora are twins but this has never been important to them. Besides their penchant for silence, they don’t share many personality traits and couldn’t look more different. Dora is always looking down, focused on her own two feet getting her where they need to go so she can stop thinking about how hard it is to go anywhere and do anything. Jamie’s chin is always turned up slightly toward the sky, a gentle cloud cupping his face and daring him to levitate off the ground that tethers him.

Jamie squished his eyes together like he was suppressing tears and then he walked away. Dora rolled her eyes and suddenly Marshall didn’t want to be around her anymore so he followed Jamie to the bathroom. He pushed in quietly and Jamie was wiping his tears in the mirror, dragging the wet from his nose to his ear, a temporary scar in the fluorescent light. He still looked cool somehow. He made sensitivity look like it should be printed across a magazine in full color.

“Hey,” Marshall said.

Jamie watched him in the mirror only looking sort of surprised.

“Sorry she was so mean to you,” he added. “I didn’t know she was like that.”

Jamie considered this and shrugged. He hopped from the stool he was perched on and walked to the open stall. He turned to Marshall and pointed at his feet, indicating he should stay where he is. Jamie locked the stall door, used the toilet, and came out looking like he’d never been distressed in the first place.

“Thanks,” he said and walked past Marshall as though nothing had happened. As though he hadn’t set in motion a turning of gears in this boy’s heart that would turn and churn and pull him through the days for years to come.

That turning of gears powers Marshall through this day in the tangential present. When he picks up Beaver, Jamie is gone but that’s okay because he’s going to see him tonight and this time he won’t kiss a girl in front of him because he got nervous and had to do something with his hands that wasn’t violent. Even in the absence of violence, he’d still inflicted a wound.

At the trailer, Marshall sits Beaver down in the living room. Carolina has been working on his helmet all week. The flower has expanded into rolling fields and scurrying creatures, running water and tall trees all unfolding around this beautiful flower as though it is the life-giving sun of this universe. It makes Marshall miss the feeling of a brush in his hand being pulled across the canvas by some unseen force compelling him.

“Alright,” he says to Beaver, “we’re going to a party tonight. I can’t leave you here with my mama so you gotta come. There’s gonna be drugs and high people and stuff kids aren’t supposed to see. Think you can handle that?”

“Yeah,” he replies without really thinking about it. “Long as my ma isn’t one of the high people. That would be weird. For me.”

“Nope. All youthful high people. They can still get weird though. Nice people, but you can still punch someone and scream and stuff if they make you uncomfortable. You know how to throw a punch?”

He doesn’t so Marshall shows him how to stand, putting his weight on one foot, how to hook the arm with the thumb outside of the fist and put all of his weight behind his arm and follow through with the turning of his hips. He picks it up pretty quick and Marshall lets him practice on his stomach. The kid doesn’t weigh much but he figures out how to use his weight to his advantage, remaining light on his feet until the moment his arm springs forward.

Marshall lifts his shirt and shows Beaver the red spots that’ll turn to yellow bruises in the morning. “You did good. Aim for here.” He points to a spot with only a smattering of red, just at the base of his stomach. “Right here with the right force will knock the breath outta someone and you’ll have plenty of time to run.”

He was only trying to explain the best potential course of action but Beaver winds back and punches him real hard in the gut and Marshall doubles over in an attempt to catch the breath that no longer belongs to his lungs. “Just like that,” he wheezes.

Beaver looks proud.

Once he can breathe again, Marshall crouches to bring the two of them eye to eye. “Anybody asks, your name is John and you’re just there hanging out. Everybody at these parties is there avoiding some personal shit so no one is gonna press you if you keep it simple. Got it?”

“Sure as a piece of pie,” Beaver says with a toothy grin.

Marshall dresses himself in a pair of loose jeans and a Beach Boys tee that crops at the waistline, the dark hairs on his stomach visible if he stretches. He’d like to believe that this is something Jamie would want to see but he doesn’t know anything. He keeps the cowboy hat on under Beaver’s advisement though the kid seems sly about it for some reason.

Marshall slides a flask filled with whiskey into the only free pocket in his backpack and ushers Beaver out the front door. All week long, Truck and his old men watched the boys come and go from their sad little lawn chairs and said nothing. Maybe because it was later in the day now, maybe because they’d started drinking early, maybe just because he feels like it, Truck chooses now to say something.

“What’s up with the kid, Marsha?” The only nickname Marshall has outright rejected, not because it’s born of an obvious attempt at cruelty, but because it comes from a boring place of transphobia, the idea that Marshall is a woman because he has sex with men which just isn’t true. He likes having sex with men only because he is a man.

“Kid’s name is John and he’s none of your business and he lives with me now and you can fuck off,” Marshall says rapid fire from beneath the brim of his hat.

Truck scoffs and takes a long pull of his beer while he tries to think of whatever useless words will spill from his mouth. “Fucking groomer, that’s what you are,” he mutters as if he has the hand of his favorite alt-right Youtuber up his ass puppeting his every thought.

Beaver stands slightly behind him. Marshall makes his broad frame bigger than it already is. “At least one of us is grooming ourselves, Trucker, I can smell you from over here like something died in the fat folds of your unwashed ass.”

Truck frowns. “That’s not…it means you’re a fucking pedophile, dumbass.”

“I know what you meant to mean, idiot, I was turning the word on you to make a better joke, keep up.”

Truck’s dad slaps the back of Truck’s head with a flat palm. “Cunt. Fuck are you getting all these new age names from? Just call him a faggot like the rest of us.”

Marshall nods. “Yeah, just call me a faggot like the rest of ‘em. At least that one is true.”

Truck’s face flushes red. “Whatever. I’m watching you, faggot.”

“There ya go, bud.” Marshall ushers Beaver ahead of him and they walk away. “Keep watchin’ me walk away and we’ll see which one of us is a real faggot, fellas,” he calls over his shoulder.

The Willis men take turns hitting and chastising one another, slurs falling from their mouths like a sort of incantation to protect them from anyone but themselves. In another world, in one where the Willis men gave themselves a reason to live and cared for their own wellbeing, they’d all be asking Marshall to take the others out and he’d do it if only they’d ask.

Marshall hadn’t broken a sweat, had been dealing with these men long enough that it was no more difficult than a round of tennis, swatting their defenses back at them with a quick snap of the wrist. But now, with his back turned and Beaver safely in front of him, he let himself feel his heart racing in his chest, the tightness in his every muscle. It was one thing to defend himself against their hollow slurs but another thing entirely to have another life to protect as well. He was right to think that he couldn’t leave Beaver home alone with those men right across the way. He didn’t trust them farther than he could throw them which would actually be pretty far but that’s not the point. Now that Truck had decided to engage, now that they’d really noticed Beaver’s presence, it was only a matter of time before something went sour.

My kid does all the things I thought about / runs into nature as I chase her down

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