Miles.

As You Like It I always hated hospitals.

Whether it was because Mom spent so much time in her d.a.m.ned emergency room, time we can never have back, or because of the deadening, antiseptic smell of fright I got when I walked into one, I don"t know. But I hated them.

Brennan"s parents were hurrying out of their house when I drove up the next morning. I felt very self-conscious as they peered at me and came closer, as if to confirm it was actually me driving the VW Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Doris" eyes filled as they met mine. George reached into the car to shake my hand, and asked me to follow them. I was mystified, but complied.

A wave of despair and slow, creeping panic overcame me as their minibus turned into the parking lot of Mom"s old hospital. It became unbearably worse as we pa.s.sed through the place and stopped in a ward I could see held patients that were in a very bad way. Papu died in one of these...chambers. Was the fridge where Mom and Dad were kept downstairs somewhere?

George and Doris DeVere gestured for me to enter a room without them.

Oh, my G.o.d, I hated hospitals.

Once I was in Brennans room, the rotting, lonely damp of my summer steeled me enough to open my eyes, but not enough to prepare me for what I saw.

Brennan"s body was a ma.s.s of bandages, tubes, and pain.

His left arm, his throwing arm, was in a cast and suspended by a pulley. The cast went from his neck to his elbow. Both of his legs had bruises on them in different places, while his right foot was taped to a brace.

His free hand rested sideways on his chest where the suction cups of the heart monitor were placed. There was a terrible, sewn-up gash across his wrist. Below that, he was hooked up to an IV.

Brennan"s face was only slightly better. His long, blond hair was dirty and matted, pulled outside of the bandages that covered his forehead and the right side of his face. His right eye was surrounded by swollen and discolored flesh. Somehow, his thin, gentle lips were left intact, except that they were cracked from dryness. His breath sounded horrible through the oxygen tubes in his nose and a tube hooked over the corner of his mouth.

Had someone thrown him from an airplane without a parachute, for Christ"s sake?

I was afraid to get close to the bed.

A young Asian nurse came into the room as if I wasn"t there, busily looking over the various checkpoints across my friend"s body. She didn"t appear very cheering. "He doesn"t stay awake for very long, so don"t you keep him up." I nodded before she left.

It took me a few minutes to be able to come up and stand beside Brennan. I carefully touched his fingers. They moved slightly. I rubbed my hands over my face like I was trying to shake off some awful nightmare, but, no, it was still there when I opened my eyes and met Brennan"s, which had also opened a few centimeters.

A sound croaked from his throat. He began moving his jaw even though I could see pain shoot through his face as he did. "Don"t say anything, Brennan." He kept doing it, and I began to panic. My eyes spun around the small and bright room until I saw a tray with a gla.s.s and pitcher of water.

I slid my hand under Brennan"s bandaged head to lift him up a few inches. His lips met the ice water with relief. He almost smiled at me. "I knew you"d come," he said, in a voice that left no doubts about how much pain he was in, just laying there, whatever doubts anyone but a blind man could have had.

I put Brennan back onto his rotten hospital pillow. I almost made him smile again as I brushed my hand over his soft cheek. I took an ice cube out of the gla.s.s and ran it over his lips until I couldn"t hold it any longer.

"That feels great."

"Don"t waste your strength thanking me." I kept one hand on his face near his lips and the other flat on his stomach.

"Thank you for still being my friend."

"My G.o.d, Brennan, be quiet." I was trying to be strong for him by not letting the tears in my eyes roll down my cheeks. I nearly started laughing, thinking about his theory about tears and being strong.

"It isn"t as bad as it looks." Brennan was such a bad liar. He looked like he was about to fall back into healing sleep. "I was going to visit you yesterday...for your birthday."

Brennan drifted off just as my d.a.m.ned tears fell. His dad came in and walked me out of the room and the building with a rather fatherly arm over my shoulders as I smothered the remainder of my cry.

"We were so caught up with everything last night, n.o.body called you. I"m sorry."

"That"s okay." I stared out across the hospital parking lot to the adjacent prairie. "I"m never around when someone I love gets hurt." I paused, trying to give my voice a transfusion. "I love him."

"He loves you," George DeVere replied, with an equanimity most fathers I knew would find impossible to match in a similar situation. The care and respect I saw in his tired grey eyes was not a by-product of too many drugs or a cool Woodstock way of life. It was much simpler than that. He was a father who loved his son, end of story. "It"s that kind of love that put him in one of those beds in there." I couldn"t tell if he was being accusatory. "He doesn"t see why others hate him for his...your...love." I glanced up to the low and dark clouds covering the summer sky, wishing it would rain. "How no one seems to understand."

"Or won"t," I added.

"Maybe in a different time and place," George said idly.

I spent the rest of the afternoon driving aimlessly through the smartly landscaped and mostly affluent streets of my old suburb. I pa.s.sed our old house, and saw the new owners getting out of their car. They were black. I turned down four good offers before a non-white put one in. Uncle Alex thought my parting shot to the subdivision of ex-city dwellers was needlessly vindictive, and loved every bit of it.

It began to rain. I thought the canvas top was going to snap off its hinges as I tried to raise it back up before I was soaked through. I continued my cruise down bad memory lane before I spotted Ozzie running home through one of our old parks. He wore a short pair of cut-offs, a black, sleeveless t-shirt, and had a towel rolled up in one of his hands. Probably coming back from the pool, I thought.

"Hey, Kneecaps!" Ozzie skidded to a halt with a smile. "Get in." He stared at me and my Bug for an incredulous second before coming in from the cloudburst.

"I knew you"d start spending that money of yours before college, son of a b.i.t.c.h!" He playfully shoved me sideways with his elbow. Oz glanced down at his wet clothes. "Are you sure you want my wet body in your car?"

There was a time when I might have thought, no, I want your wet body someplace else. "Don"t worry about it."

"Want to go to the show?" A movie or two sounded good to me. I gave him a thumbs-up and headed for the revival house. "Can we stop by my place to change my clothes?"

We looked at each other and smiled. "Only if I can watch."

"Hey, I"ll let you watch me jack off if I can borrow your car Friday night!"

"Not just for watching, Kneecaps."

I waited inside of the large screened porch that took up most of Ozzie"s backyard, enjoying the sound and smell of the falling rain as he got dressed.

Oz emerged with two cans of Mexican beer in his hands. He tossed me one and sat down next to me on the wooden bench that faced the remainder of the yard. He was wearing an old red White Sox jersey.

"I"m sorry I wasn"t around on your birthday. We had to go to a barbecue at my Dad"s house." Ozzie"s Venezuelan parents had been divorced for years. He and his three little brothers lived in our old ritzy-t.i.tsy suburb with their mom, who spent most of her day at the health and country club, before throwing in a few token hours at home with the boys. They ordered out, most of the time. The dad lived somewhere in the flatlands beyond Joliet, selling cars to pay for his ex"s lifestyle. "Is it too late to get you a present?"

"That"s okay. You"ve kept me company all summer. That"s present enough. Besides, I made out pretty good this year."

"I"ll say!" He took a long swig of the cheap beer. "You"re so lucky."

My lips tightened. "That depends on how you look at it."

Ozzie put a hand on my arm. "You know what I mean." I nodded and finished my can. "I"ve always been kind of jealous of you. It seems like you"ve got so much more than I do, but I forget how you got a lot of it. d.a.m.n, I"m sorry."

"At least no one will throw cabbages and tomatoes at you and your date when you go to the prom." He put his hand on my arm again as we laughed quietly, hearing lightning in the distance.

"It must be hard on you, sometimes."

Did you say "hard on", Kneecaps? "The loneliness is, I guess, but I"m not sure my being queer has anything to do with it."

Ozzie shook his head. "Don"t call yourself that. If you didn"t listen to that Russian music so much, you wouldn"t feel so lonely all the time."

I sat back on the bench and finished the can of beer. "Have any of you gone to see Brennan?"

"Huh. Most of them haven"t talked to him since he...well, you know."

"No, in the hospital, I mean."

Ozzie looked at me. His eyes were wide and frightened. I could barely hear his voice. "Brennan is in the hospital?" I nodded, watching him carefully. There was something I felt in Ozzie"s measured, almost stiff reaction. "What happened?"

"I saw him earlier today. He was beaten within an inch of his life. His throwing arm was broken, too. I don"t think one person did it, myself."

Ozzie looked away from me as he stood up, walking to the edge of the screened porch. He put one of his hands flat against the wire mesh, which was damp from the rain that gently hissed down around us. His head sunk to his shoulders. "I thought they were kidding." He began shaking his head in denial. "Brennan..."

"Who?" My voice became level and cold, as cold as I felt my soul wax.

"I had no idea," Ozzie said, turning back to look at me. His brown curly hair and boyish looks were draped in regret. "My G.o.d..."

"Who was it, Oz?" He caught the hard and already vengeful glaze that had come over my dark eyes.

"Eric and Mickey..."

Eric Brazier was an effete toad from a stuck-up family of doctors just about all of us hated. Whatever was hip, he liked, and whoever wasn"t popular, he didn"t. He acted like a leader, but only after he knew what everyone else had in mind, so he could propose or promote an idea that he didn"t have the imagination to come up with in the first place. There was always some rumor going around, about his father buying a grade for him here, or he buying one directly from a smarter student there. I didn"t doubt any of it. His one redeeming quality was that he could move his wiry, sunlamp-tanned body like a pretzel, and was a great second baseman as a result.

Mickey Sreckov was a different story. His parents were second-generation white trash that maneuvered their way into what they fancied was "cla.s.s through slum-lording and real estate graft. Like our suburb, a haven for whites of varying means who just didn"t want to live with the blacks that had encroached into their old city neighborhoods, was cla.s.sy, as if property tax had anything to do with cla.s.s. Mickey was a soft-talking, hard-thinking mixer, handsome and well-built, but arrogant about it. He was the best center fielder I"ve ever played with, but a fink, all the same.

"...they were the ones who always talked about it...showing Brennan "how to be a man", they kept saying. The rest of us blew them off."

"You didn"t do anything else?"

Ozzie"s voice was almost hysterical. "We...I didn"t take them seriously!" He sat down heavily next to me. "None of us understood or liked what Brennan told us. Here was our friend for, what, how many years? Then, one day, he"s somebody else." I looked at Ozzie remotely. "You"re right. He is somebody else." I stood up and dropped the empty beer can into Ozzie"s lap. "He"s a hospital patient now."

I called on Brennan every evening until visiting hours were over. George spent the morning with him, and Doris covered the afternoon. As bad as he looked when I first saw him, Brennan"s first-rate overall health and fitness, not to mention glowing spirit, helped him recover quickly.

I got pretty silly about the whole thing, bringing him a different gift each time I came to that d.a.m.ned hospital, which embarra.s.sed him to no end and was part of the reason why I kept doing it. I especially liked bringing in forbidden food, like chocolates or pizza or bagels, because I"d always eat more than my half and knew perfectly well the nurse would be able to smell the goodies in the room after I left.

Our conversations always remained light and cheery. We talked about the end of another remarkably undistinguished White Sox season, what we didn"t do together over the summer, going back to school, nonsense like that. Brennan was anxious to see the apartment in Hyde Park, to throw in trying to get the place bribe-free inspection-proof, and couldn"t wait to go for a spin in the Bug.

We spent one night going through the box of postcards Zane had brought me back from Scandinavia. An entire box! They ranged from glaciers in Norway and forests in Sweden to shots of naked skiers, dirty goings-on in Finnish saunas, and mysterious, spy story kind of frames of Helsinki, Oslo, and Stockholm. We excitedly agreed to try and follow Zane"s footsteps the following summer, and to ask Zane to accompany us if we did.

On another night, Brennan made me read him some of the poetry I had written in bad Italian. I read it badly, and Brennan understood it badly. Just the same, we almost cried together, afterwards. That went badly, too.

August wound on slowly. I was glad Zane was back in town, since we talked on the phone every night, and school was finally about to resume.

One night, in the middle of trying to write a poem about Brennan, I decided to call up Ozzie. It was a short and unfeeling conversation.

"I don"t know if they"ll tell me anything. They"re afraid, you know."

Good, I thought. "Just find out for me, Kneecaps. Do yourself a favor and consider it my birthday present."

I hung up and went back to my poem.

It was the night before Brennan was to be released that we talked about something more serious.

"Why did you tell everyone about yourself?"

Brennan shrugged, as if the whole affair was nothing. "It"s who I am. It"s who we are."

"I know that. But does it matter if the world knows?"

"It"s not the world I told, just our friends."

I tried not to laugh. "Oh, yeah, friends. Sure."

"They"re people we"ve played ball with, gotten drunk with, h.e.l.l, we even went skinny-dipping with them those couple of times! Friends we"ve spent the night with, at their place and ours."

My G.o.d, he even sounded like he believed what he was saying! "Right, such good friends they attacked you like animals, because they didn"t like the way you f.u.c.k." Brennan was hurt. I leaned over and kissed his forehead. I think a pa.s.sing nurse saw me. I wondered if she would get a few orderlies to beat me up. Let "em try, I thought. I had Dads old Beretta stuffed inside my belt, just over my crack.

I tried to change the subject. "By the way, Zane asked about you."

"Really?" I nodded. "That"s cool. He"s a pretty nice guy, you know?"

"If his father didn"t control so much of his life, he"d be even nicer."

"Do you think he"s cute?"

I was surprised by Brennan"s question. I"m sure the surprise showed. "I never thought about it. Now that you ask, well, yeah, I guess so. What about you?"

"It"s hard to forget all the noises he made doing it with that girl at your old house. Talk about a party. What a turn-on!" Hm! "Do you think he"s...you know?"

"Queer?" Brennan winced. He hated the word. "No. His father wouldn"t let him be, even if he was."

Brennan gestured for me to sit next to him on his hospital bed. "I dont hurt so much anymore."

"Its the bagels and matzo ball soup. Zora says theyre both medicinal."

"But physical hurt heals, eventually. That"s not the worst way you can hurt someone. What if you crush their spirit? What do you think takes longer to heal, an elbow or a person"s heart? Emotional and psychological hurt are just as bad as someone kicking you in the head."

He rubbed his cheek and shuddered. Brennan"s smile was feeble. I sighed. I knew he was talking about Felix.

Brennan took my hand and held it between his. "What happened...happened. It hurt a lot, sure. I wouldn"t want it to happen again, but, as hurt goes..." He shook his head. "...it hurt a whole lot more not being friends with you."