I’d just turned fifteen and earned my learner’s permit that summer. I was glad to be done with school for a while, where everyone started washing together with their own groups. I wasn’t much athletic or overly smart or given to a particular flair for artsy stuff so I just sort of drifted here and there and wasn’t much to nobody. That’s why after I met Tyler and for some reason the older boy took a liking to me I could barely wait to get up mornings and drive Dad’s rusted truck into the city to work for the local college in South Mississippi. Dad knew somebody who knew somebody through our church and they got me on for a couple months working construction.
Turns out I didn’t do much constructing at all. It was mostly destructing of one kind or the other.
My first day I pulled on some old overhauls and Dad’s cracked boots and stopped for my breakfast of a jumbo iced sweet bun and a store brand cola. When I got to the maintenance building a wooly old man took me into a garage where ten other crusty men turned to consider me. They wore beards and had Jesus cross tattoos some of them and all drank steaming coffee from Styrofoam cups. When the director of the place introduced me they nodded and went back to smoking their cigarettes like taking medicine. Long pulls, slow exhales, ash an inch long before it fell. Not a one of them moved with what the Bible might call haste nor did I see one smile in those three months.
Turns out I was early. A few minutes later the other temporary guys—some closer to my age and few in their twenties and thirties, maybe—showed up and everyone walked toward the fleet of school-colored black and gold Ford Rangers. A white-haired man cleared his throat behind me and said, “Load up,” and pointed with his shaking cigarette to a truck and I did load up.
The first week I mostly painted cinder block walls and replaced bent nails in classrooms. The white-haired man spent most of his time smoking until lunch and then after lunch more of the same. He’d walk in to clear his throat at me every couple hours. The second week I realized this was the way of everyone working there. Summer was the slow time and they had to drag out jobs. I was told to not get in any hurry with my caulking or screwing. At home, Dad said, “Don’t rock any boats.” I got good at easing off and found myself staring out windows and exploring hallways when I got kinda bored. The school was quiet then so there weren’t many folks around and I figured I could’ve hollered in those long hallways and nobody would’ve made a fuss though I never had the nerve to holler once.
At lunch time we all met back at the garage. Some men ate sandwiches and some went for meals and some just seemed to smoke more. Three of them set up a table and ate cold lunches and drank colas for fifteen minutes then played as many games of dominoes as they could in the remaining forty-five. The slap of dominoes, the shout of “Wash ‘em” when somebody won—I still hear clear as daylight.
Week three came and a new guy showed in the garage. This was Tyler. He was skinny and wore a Yankees hat and ratty skateboard shoes. Tyler was only nineteen but he smoked just like the other men, like they were prescribed tobacco. That day they called us all to pile in a big white van and Tyler sat beside me and asked my name and I told him and he just got to talking. One thing about Tyler, he didn’t care for much quiet.
The thing of it was, nobody had said anything to me in those first three weeks that wasn’t an order. Maybe that was on account of me being the youngest and the men distrusted me because of my age or just simply didn’t give a damn about a kid. But Tyler had just met me and here he was already talking to me like we were friends.
The new job site was condemned graduate and faculty apartments needing gutting. The foreman dropped all us summer workers off with sledge hammers and mallets and sweep brooms and not one shred of safety equipment and told us to get after it. You didn’t need to be no genius to swing a hammer hard and pretty soon the others started talking. Bets were made on how many swings it would take to knock some cabinets off a wall or what have you and whoever lost had to be on sweep broom for the day and we got to taking shifts so you really only had to work two or three hours a day.
I didn’t smoke but when Tyler asked if I wanted a cigarette that day I said I would. He started walking away from the job site and I said, “Won’t we get in trouble?” but he said, “These old boys don’t care.”
Tyler led me across a small grass lawn to one of the dorm buildings. Inside was a stairwell. He liked to smoke there because it was so much cooler on the bottom floor on account of the stairwell going up four flights. He taught me that all the heat went up. Said it was like the houses in New Orleans built a hundred years ago with their high ceilings. I’d never been to New Orleans so I took his word on the matter and filed it away to tell others like I just knew the fact by myself.
I said, “We ain’t supposed to smoke in here.”
Tyler said, “You’re right,” and lit his cigarette and offered me some peanut butter crackers. So we sat and smoked and my eyes watered but by the fourth or fifth day I got the hang of it.
The next Monday we went off to have our smoke in the cool stairwell. A couple of minutes into Tyler calling off some story about his friend’s car breaking down on the Gulf Coast, the door opened and I jumped. We’d been caught and I was already thinking don’t tell Dad. I stared at Tyler but he was looking behind me at the door. I hadn’t seen that look before. Like someone had poured warm butter into his chest and the biscuits were rising up fresh right in his heart.
The door clicked shut. I turned. The girl wore a tank top and my Lord a reddish running bra and black shorts and her hair was light brown, the color of Dad’s church shoes. God but pretty didn’t even come close to her. My throat gummed up. A small mole rested just under her left eye and on her nose were scattered freckles like the ones that crop up in the summer and go back away in the winter.
She didn’t ask who we were or act scared but said, “You can’t smoke in here, you know.”
Tyler said, “We know.”
Then she just smiled at him and walked toward the concrete steps Tyler stood on and went right past him, her hair bouncing in its ponytail, and up to the second floor. We followed her with our eyes and ears until the door to her hall shut. Tyler looked at his phone and I heard him whisper, “Ten thirty.” Her sweaty smell sort of kept in the stairwell and no flower ever smelled that good and even now I can recall it easy.
Every day Tyler made sure we were smoking in that stairwell at ten fifteen and three days out of the next four she came in between then and eleven and soon we expected to see her and she us. I never said much but every day about ten in the morning I’d get to feeling nervous and breathing shallow.
Tyler, though, he talked and asked her questions just as long as she would stay, which at first was only half a minute but then got to be five or ten. Her name was Haley and she looked just like a Haley and she was taking summer classes so she could graduate early and be a nurse. She was from out west of town and probably lived in a planned subdivision and you could tell she came from comfort because she went running every day in Nike shoes and her skin was smooth and she never had a pimple. She didn’t smoke at all either.
One day she asked if I was Tyler’s little brother and he said, “This’n? Sure he is.”
I must have smiled real big because they started laughing and pretty soon we all were and I believe that was the happiest I was all summer.
Once she even showed us her dorm room. The whole hall was empty except for one other. She didn’t have a roommate for the summer which I figured was pretty much the coolest way to live possible. All on her own with two beds. Girly colored plants in the window. The room smelled like her only more, like she’d rolled around on a quilt and threw it on top of you. I looked out her window to where we should be working and felt guilty. Tyler never felt guilty near as I could tell so I told myself to stop acting like a stupid kid because any brother of Tyler’s wouldn’t think that way.
We stayed in her room for a few minutes while they talked and I sat on the floor but all I could think about was opening the drawers in her dresser to see what color her underwear was and I felt guilty again and kinda sick and even trying to think like Tyler couldn’t make me not.
Then it happened. After the third week of us meeting Haley I checked the time and walked to where me and Tyler usually met to walk across the field. He wasn’t there. I walked the job site. Nothing. I told myself maybe he’d gone a little early so I walked over to the dorms.
Inside the cool stairwell, no Tyler. I sat and opened my pack of smokes because Tyler told me I had to start buying my own. Two drags in I heard it. Real soft at first but I’d seen some movies and heard older guys talking at P.E. so I knew what it was.
My whole body went hot as fire. I tasted something like a peach gone over ripe. My legs shook when I stood so I grabbed the iron railing and before I knew what I was doing I’d walked up the stairs. The door to Haley’s hallway was stuck open on warped tile. I had to swallow three times just to step into the hall itself and creep closer to her room. God but I felt sick and knew I should’ve turned around but I didn’t because I heard her voice making a sort of squeaking sound or maybe like when you try to push something heavy and you can’t hardly budge it and I heard his voice too but it was only sort of a grunt and all at once I looked down and by God a hard-on strained against my overhauls so much it hurt me and I kept toeing down the hall until I was right outside her room where the door wasn’t all the way closed.
I did peek inside. They two were on her pink sheets and Tyler kneeled rocking behind her. Haley had her face in the sheets and one hand up against the wall. I couldn’t stop looking. Her hair was fanned out and the soles of her feet were pink like her sheets and I just stared and listened to her making that squeaking sound and when I couldn’t take no more I ran to the bathroom and didn’t even get my underwear off before I messed them up good. I ruined the underwear and had to stuff them in a trash can and still my hard-on didn’t go away for a long time. I ran out of that dorm and back to the job site and acted like I was working but my hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t hold a hammer. I didn’t see Tyler until the next day.
That night Mom asked me if something was wrong and I told her no and she asked how come I wasn’t eating my collard stew and I said I just wasn’t hungry. She didn’t like it but only poured more sweet tea for Dad and didn’t ask no more. But moms always know and there’s nothing you can get past them.
That night in bed I couldn’t think about nothing else but what I seen and heard and I couldn’t get to sleep until I went in the bathroom and pictured myself where Tyler was and Haley in front of me and the whole thing didn’t take long after that but I still couldn’t really get all the way asleep.
I heard once in church that the truth is supposed to free you so maybe that’s why I’m telling this memory, because it’s got me chained.
Pretty soon Tyler was going up to her room a lot alone and not smoking with me and I acted like it wasn’t no deal nor did I know what for. But I did continue to creep up to that hallway and watch outside Haley’s open door and run to the bathroom. I couldn’t stop myself and thought of little else. I sort of became fixed. I looked forward to it so much I itched but strange enough the idea of them doing it without me there turned me angry. I hated the weekends because I just knew Tyler and Haley were up in her room and I didn’t have any excuse to take the truck to the school for all the gas back and forth and couldn’t never lie to Mom anyhow.
The worst of it is, is that I felt let down by Tyler. He’d called me his little brother but now he’d betrayed me for Haley. They shared something and I shared it too in a sort of soiled way and we had that but I knew I wasn’t really in on it because it wasn’t for me. I was hot jealous all the same.
The summer was getting on and August hit. The idea of going back to school liked to kill me. I turned sour and made up excuses to not smoke with Tyler even when he wanted to and called me little brother. Truth, now: I cried about it all more than once at home out in the woods.
The last week of work came. Tyler sneaked off to her room and I followed like usual but when I got to the stairwell I didn’t hear them making their sounds. I thought maybe the hall door was closed but it wasn’t and I stood outside Haley’s hall and listened. Soon I heard their voices. I crept down the hall until I was close enough and listened hard.
Tyler said, “I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing really to understand.”
“But why,” he said, voice raising, “can’t we just keep on together?”
“I already told you. I want to be a nurse.”
“So what?”
“What do you want to do, Tyler?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet. We all don’t know at nineteen what it is we’ll do.”
“But I do. I know what I’ll be and it’s just different.”
“How?”
“How what?” Haley said.
“How is it different?”
“Because you work construction and you don’t go to school. Tyler, we’re just not the same.”
“You want me in school? Fine. I can get in here.”
“Tyler…”
“What?”
“We can’t be together. You know that too.”
“I don’t know it. I love you.” His voice caught and it made my own heart kick in my chest. “Look, Haley. I love you.”
“Stop it,” she said. I heard something dark in her voice I hadn’t before. A sharp note like a knife through paper. “Just quit, Tyler. This was just fun.”
“Fun?”
“But it can’t go on.”
“Haley.”
“I want you to leave.”
I knew I should’ve run but my legs had gone to concrete.
“Haley, please.”
“Go.”
Her door busted open and Tyler was walking hard right toward me. His eyes were red and his face wet and he wasn’t surprised to see me and it took me a while after to figure out why he wasn’t surprised but eventually I did and that fact does haunt me in spite to this day. He kept coming with me stuck to the spot and when he reached me he pushed me down hard with one hand. The back of my head hit the cinder block walk and he never did stop but walked straight through the hallway door and galloped down the stairs. Haley must have heard me yelp when he pushed me down and she walked out to find me crying there on the tile. Her face was dry. She said, “Hope you had your fun. Get out of here, little brother.”
Tyler never came back to work. The next week I started tenth grade but these years later every time I go to the doctor I’m still scared she’ll be there working as a nurse, and we’ll have to look at each other and pretend we don’t recognize ourselves and relive those few weeks—mostly heartache for me, but for us three some fleeting moments of stolen pleasure before the fire of it turned to cold smoke in the crush of life’s onward trample—while she writes down my weight and height and says the doctor will be coming in soon.