Kenny's Back. Victor J. Banis
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came back in. Ingrid must have gone to her room. Olsen was in the front room, mending. I looked in on her after I had locked up.
“Good night,” I said from the doorway. “Don’t strain your eyes with that.”
She smiled faintly. “That’s like saying don’t squeeze the apples after they’re already sauce.” She looked up over her glasses. “She didn’t mean what she said, Mar.”
“I know she didn’t,” I lied.
She sighed and folded her hands thoughtfully over her sewing. “Lord willing, someday I’ll see her married to some nice young man. That’s what she needs. I always thought how nice it would be if she and Kenny…but there, now I’m talking like a wishful old woman.”
“Don’t stay up all night wishing.” I grinned at her and left, climbing the stairs toward my room. It was always easy to forget that mothers were human, and there was Olsen being just a little small too, but in a nice way. And she was right: it would be nice for Ingrid if she and Kenny were to hit it off that way. Probably it would even be a good thing for Kenny, in the long run.
Well, when it came to that, I was being the smallest of all, wasn’t I? It was Ingrid who was most responsible for Kenny’s coming back, and who had done the most to try to patch things up between him and his mother. And Olsen wasn’t the first mother to wish her daughter could marry the boss’s son. But what excuse did I have for being jealous. Love wasn’t prerogative.
I cleaned up and went to my own room, where I undressed in the dark and threw myself across the top of the bedclothes. I yawned a few times and tried to convince myself that I was dog-tired and would fall right asleep.
I didn’t, of course. I lay in the dark and stared up at the ceiling where the shadows of the big pear tree’s branches chased one another back and forth with each breeze.
He was here, in the house, in the next room. If I called out, he’d probably hear me. Maybe he would even come slipping along the hall as he sometimes used to, and we’d smoke a cigarette in the dark and talk seriously about things that only seem important at times like that. Maybe….
The hall floor creaked, but it was only Olsen, coming to bed. It wasn’t until she had gone by and the door to her room had opened and closed that I realized how tight my breath was in my chest. I sat up, shaking a little, and lit a cigarette.
He won’t be coming down that hall, I told myself firmly, almost enjoying the flash of pain it caused me. That was too many years and too many pains ago, and probably he had forgotten all about that, just as he had forgotten that I was Mar, and not Ingemar. He had outgrown what I had never quite learned to live with, and it was time now for me to stop kidding myself about it and pretending it had been different.
Kenny had changed. Well, what of it? That wasn’t so unusual. I’d changed too, in a lot of ways. Olsen had grown absentminded and I was willing to bet her hair was a lot grayer than it looked to me. Ingrid had grown up and become what everyone said was a beautiful woman, even though I still saw her as a skinny little girl.
The only thing that hadn’t changed was the past. All of those times that I kept remembering, they were just the way they had always been, even to our very first day in the pink house. I was seventeen then, and Kenny thirteen, but there was more than four years difference between us. He was everything that a boy should be: devilish and full of life and fun; and if losing his father the year before had saddened him, it had done it in ways that didn’t show, except maybe in the way he attached himself to me right off. And although I wasn’t much more than a kid myself, I probably seemed old enough to be a father to him, or at least an older brother. I had been the man of our family for some time already, and was as somber and grim a Swede as ever took over running a farm.
We were hired in a package. If the truth were known, Kenny’s mother was probably being as much charitable as she was practical. But even then Mrs. Baker wasn’t a strong woman and she was a widow by that time, with this big farm and another smaller one to run, and no one to run it for her but a thirteen year old boy who worked hard enough when he wasn’t hiking through the woods hunting critters or taking off for the swimming hole.
That was how we’d come here. Olsen was to run the house and I, with some understandable doubts on Mrs. Baker’s part, would run the farm. Ingrid, well, she helped Olsen and tormented Kenny.
Even then the world revolved around Kenny. If things were hard, when bad weather threatened the crops, he’d work around the clock and weary the strongest hand. But let him hear that the catfish were good someplace, or let someone even hint at some bit of trouble he could be stirring up, and he was off and running. He would stand all of our hair on end, mine the straightest; and then, when we were the maddest and I was all for crating him up and dropping him in the creek after his catfish, in he’d saunter, as calm as the first day of May. I gave him credit: he never lied about things or ducked a question. He’d confess all in a way that said, “What are you upset about anyway? It was only an outhouse that I pushed over, and I didn’t even know Mr. Craig was in it.”
And of course, by the time he was done smiling at us and doing little favors for us, and fawning over us, we’d all be asking ourselves just what we had been so upset about. Except, while we were asking, he’d be off on some new mischief.
Or, if all else failed and he couldn’t soothe our anger any other way, he’d put on a face a mile long and then we would hear, “Nobody cares about me,” and the like, until we all felt sorry for having been mad and outdid one another showing him we did care. Olsen always said later that the only people who could afford to say such a thing were those who knew better. Kenny knew better, of course, but that didn’t stop him from using it to get his way.
When did it change? When did Kenny stop being the little kid that kept me hopping, the little brother I’d never had, and become something else, something crazy and undreamed of? I remember all, every day, every minute we spent together, but I don’t remember when it changed.
When the work was light, I’d many times go off with him, hiking and fishing. We found a cave, that was our place to escape from the world of work and responsibilities, and we spent hours there. Or we’d go swimming in the creek behind the pasture. I must have seen that bare ass of his a hundred times and never thought about anything more than walloping it when he made me mad, and he’d seen me raw as many times.
“Big Swede,” he called me, and he’d never admit it, but the one thing that really got him was that I was bigger down below than he was. Never mind that I was older. He couldn’t stand being second best in anything. I’d see him look down at himself and then at me, and frown.
“Look how big it’s getting,” he said over and over again. “I’ll bet I’m bigger than you before the year’s out.” He never quite made it, even though he swore he had.
Somehow it changed. The horseplay wasn’t just horseplay, and the wrestling tired us out more, so that we would lay for long times wrapped together and panting while we caught our breath—which got harder and harder to catch each time. I should have stopped it, I guess, being the older, but even though I was old in some ways, I was still a kid in my body.
I suppose a lot of it was just kid stuff. If you took any two young boys and put them on a farm, and sent them out wrestling and swimming naked together and let them become the closest of friends, the same thing would most likely happen. For Kenny, that’s probably all it ever was. But I can’t kid myself. Even from the first time anything happened, I knew I felt about him in a way that I had always expected I would feel about a woman someday. Afterward, after Kenny, I never felt that way about anyone else, man or woman. I was convinced that I never would—that I never could.
It started with the arguments about size. Not satisfied with seeing them soft, Kenny had to compare them hard, and even though I got a little shy about it, nothing would do but what he had to get his way. Two boys, all by themselves in a cave in the woods, cocks hard—somehow they had to be gotten soft again.
I was scared after the first time, and a little guilty too, I guess, but not Kenny. That devil had found a new game that he liked best of all,