Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

Something bad covered a whole manner of sins.

Fuck you, Eddie, fuck you for making me do this, he thought on a loop. Eddie would’ve crowed to see him. He’d been pushing so long for Andrew to embrace himself, their difference, their death-made-life.

Andrew existed in that moment as both the dead man and himself, inside and outside, witness and victim all at once in an immense moment of confirmation—someone else was there.

The land had known Eddie, had given him its rites, drunk the dregs of him down. He was one and the same as that earth.

The nakedness of that admission hit like stumbling into a friend’s bathroom without realizing they’d gotten in the shower. He hadn’t seen a thing, but he was too close to revelation.

though—Sam Halse talked thick and dripping when he got into it, fat vowels and stretched consonants. He had come from here and he’d die here, that was clear.

Eddie too clever and too stupid by halves—listening to his instincts, whether or not that was smart.

Blindness lent plausible deniability to the fingers that swept across the line of Andrew’s shoulder, the broad hand squeezing the nape of his neck.

The sob that wracked him, sudden and brutal, wasn’t a surprise. He gripped the back of his skull with both hands, knees pressed to his eyes, and cried. Throughout, he was aware of them inside the house, close and ready if he were to call out. For a moment, he hadn’t felt alone.

The tree branded with Eddie’s initials would survive for more generations than Andrew had a sense of, roots stained with his death, even if only the afterimages of it.

After a night spent driving, crawling, fighting, and spilling confessions, he was a different version of himself than he had been that morning. It was rare to feel a shift so clearly. He wasn’t sure he welcomed the defamiliarization.

And worse than the pain was the gladness lurking underneath, Andrew monstrously pleased to know he hadn’t been cast off, hadn’t been left behind, that Eddie still wanted him in his final moment, even if he’d failed him in the grandest possible sense.

He didn’t belong at Vanderbilt, and he didn’t belong in Troth’s world either. He hadn’t been groomed to inherit the Fulton name and legacy. He was just Andrew Blur. All he wanted to unearth was the truth of Eddie’s last hours, to set things as right as he was able.

The road leveled out around the side of a hill, a track cut wide and long with a gentle curve and a precipitous drop past the steel barrier rail.

Sam Halse drove with the confidence of a man who knew he was a king.

He pressed his thumbnail into his wrist bone over the tattoo, and felt the earth calling to his bones. There were answers somewhere out in these woods.

You’re a selfish, entitled disaster of a person.

The sound was tuneless, flat, carrying an aggressively jaunty rhythm.

Andrew threw the wrapper out the window

stop littering andrew!!!

He wasn’t cut out for the life he’d inherited. It should’ve been him, not Eddie, in the ground.

If he put his mind to it, the death he’d expect for himself and Eddie would be an accident, a collision or flare-up, never purposeful violence. Both of them were spoiled enough to assume they’d be their own undoing, he guessed, but Eddie had paid the price.

He’d forgotten the danger of knowing, given into the temptation, and paid the price.

Blood for blood, offered to the earth—wasn’t that a familiar story, one that lived curled up at the core of him.

The land’s hungry, and it gets its due, one way or another.”

The house seethed around them, responding to his nudge. The anxious strangeness dogging his heels since his arrival resolved into a juxtaposition of realities: the boards under his feet were steeped in death, stained to the foundations with knowledge and time. Reverberations echoed for miles around, as if he stood at the center of a welcoming necropolis.

Faded photos of two tanned boys, summer sons, gazed into the family camera with hapless eagerness. They’d survived, but not unscathed.

contrapposto

“Oh Jesus, Mary, and goddamn Joseph,” Riley said. “You’re not even Catholic,” Sam replied.

then at last met his welcoming stare. Caught and catching in turn. Thunder rolled overhead.

Pain and desire sparked to a warm burn in the cold hollow of his belly, the cave of loss his revenant had dug out for itself filling instead with life.

the reminder that no matter what came afterward, he belonged to Eddie in flesh and spirit. He hadn’t asked for that inheritance, but he’d gotten it regardless.

He’d spent his whole life repressing the inheritance Eddie had inflicted on him out of careless adoration; using it on purpose was like learning another set of limbs.

I don’t want to share not even with a dead man

Interfered was a polite, euphemistic turn of phrase.

The casual touch felt like forgiveness, or an allowance.

Once in the car, Andrew asked, “You sure about doing this with me?” “Don’t say dumb shit. You’re one of mine, Blur, and we’re going to get you sorted out fine, okay?” Sam said as the engine growled to life.

Andrew shut his mouth. One of mine—that had a ring to it, and so did the promise of safety, of being taken in hand. If Riley had tried to slap a label on the thing budding between them, he’d have rejected it out of hand, because nothing encompassed the particular set of feelings he might sum up as owned. What did it mean that he found that comforting, still, now that Eddie was gone?

The work he’d done, that the cousins had helped him with despite their misgivings and his intractability, crumbled like dry soil through his fingers when he tried to mold it into a logical whole.

The curse was his and Eddie’s bond; maybe it was an answer too, if he found the right question and put it to the right person.

He’d known Eddie to the bone, or so he thought. But having Eddie’s memories inside of him was different. The tender awfulness of remembering himself through Eddie’s eyes, beautiful and cherished and wanted with raw confused intensity, with ownership, a sublimated tangled connection that Eddie had never spoken or unpacked, though it loomed so large—that understanding was an answer to the things about himself Del had made him confront, that he’d started figuring out with Halse, but it didn’t help. Having been loved wasn’t the same as being loved.

The endless taunting text messages and the raw late nights, fistfights and firelight, the one bright savage thing he’d gained from all the loss since the turn of summer—nothing else kindled him to human, eager life.

Sam Halse wasn’t going to be another almost. He’d made that mistake over and over in total ignorance for almost a decade, and he wasn’t going to do it again.

Andrew had to accept that he was going to take that maybe to his grave.

The manor resonated on the same frequency as the alien curse-gift latched to his insides—his to claim, if he would just accept the mantle of power and the cruelty that came with

Fire wouldn’t cleanse the history from that earth, but maybe it could put the bones to rest.

Curses weren’t as simple to put aside as a ghost willing to be laid to rest; that grim weight would nest inside of him until the end of his life.

“I thought about the whole thing, start to finish. How much you did for me and how much I didn’t do for you, just kept taking. And I know I want to do shit for you, with you. I do.” He sipped a quick shaken breath and finished with crushing simplicity. “You’re worth it to me.”

Possibilities swirled in the smell of gasoline and the crisp October night.