Two weeks before my sixth birthday, I ran into the house screaming, “Mario’s dead! Mario’s dead!”
My mother couldn’t hear my words over the kitchen faucet, but she heard the screen door slam shut behind me. She turned off the water and looked down at me through the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands dry on her shirt.
“What did I tell you about the door, Matthew?” she demanded in her round Yankee voice, stretching “door” out to two syllables. Her accent was always thickest when she scolded me.
“Mario’s dead!” I gasped. The tile floor in the entryway felt cold on my bare feet as I rocked back and forth. I had wet myself on my panicked run from the playground, and a bead of urine trickled down my thigh, warmer than the tears on my cheeks.
Always the stoic Yankee and no-nonsense nurse, my mother folded her arms across her chest and said, “Tell me what happened.”
“The slide—we were sliding, and Mario went down head first, I told him not to slide that way, and he hit his head on a rock, and there was blood all over his face, and he’s dead I know he’s dead!” I began to bawl at the certain knowledge of my new best friend’s death and the horror of all that blood on his face.
“Was he crying?” she asked.
I nodded, smearing dirt across my face with my hand as I wiped at my tears.
“Then he’s not dead.” She went back into the kitchen to put her chicken casserole in the oven, and came back to the front door with her sandals on. “Let’s go see if he’s alright.”
She led me, quivering and confused, down the block to Mario’s house. Mario’s mother, Gina, became my mother’s best friend over the two years we lived at Fort Riley. Long after we had all moved away, we ate Gina Bastarella Capanelli’s spaghetti sauce recipe, toned down to our family’s blander tastes. I suspect that Mario occasionally had Helen Richardson Carver’s pot roast, served with a side of spicy tomato ragout.
When we got to the end of the block, Gina was leading Mario out to the car with a bloody washcloth over his right eye. Mario was no longer crying, and he looked away when he passed us. Gina gave my mother a weary look and said, “Stitches. Plenty of ‘em, too, I’ll bet.”
My mother nodded. “Nice scar.”
“Something to remember by.”
Gina got into the car and drove away. I waved weakly, but Mario was hunched over in the back seat, pressing the cloth to his face, and didn’t see me.
By now the wetness on my shorts had spread, changing them from light blue to navy. I squirmed uncomfortably.
“Let’s get you in the tub, mister,” my mother said, and led me by the hand back to our house.
That was the first time I saw Mario covered with blood. Over the next two years, it became less traumatic for me. By the time we were seven, I was more annoyed than concerned when he broke his leg jumping from the monkey bars at recess.
Mario’s frequent and dramatic injuries made him a hero all through first grade. When he would come to school with a new bandage on his ankle, or stitches on his scalp, our classmates crowded around to admire his wounds. Because I was often the only witness to the accident, I basked in borrowed glory as I recounted the events.
“He was higher in the swing than ever,” I’d say, “when he jumped out. I think he flipped over twice before he landed. The bones were sticking straight out of his elbow—they had to pour powder all over the ground to soak up all the blood.”
Mario never told the stories himself. He let me embellish the events while he stood by, chest thrust out with pride, letting the other kids beg to touch the scar. I always got to touch the scars, and felt that they were my scars, too.
When we weren’t defying death on playground equipment, Mario and I would sit under the low wooden porches of the brick houses we lived in and plot our futures. The houses had been built almost a hundred years before, in the 1870s, for cavalry officers and their families. General Custer himself, Son of the Morning Star, had lived for a while in one of them before he went out on his own death defying stunt. Sometimes we would find old brass buttons and tin toy horses in the dry Kansas dust.
Mario was going to be a soldier like our fathers, or maybe a professional baseball player. The Mets were his team—he had their pennants and pictures all over his room. The Red Sox had my inherited loyalty, passed down from two generations of southern Maine fans, but I really didn’t have much passion one way or the other. I was going to be a biologist—I discovered the world of microscopes when I was six—or an archaeologist.
We were certain that we would both find beautiful wives and marry them together. I pictured Mario and me in smart black tuxedos, standing side by side in a church crowded with flowers and well-wishers, those faceless beauties beside us. It would be a Catholic wedding, since Mario’s family was more insistently religious than my Yankee free-thinker clan, but even my mother would be accepting so long as my wife was Baptist or Congregationalist. It didn’t occur to me until many years later that it was really Mario I wanted to marry. Our wives were incidental.
When it came time to move, I had only a vague sense of the finality of it. Our classmates had whirled in and out during first and second grades, a new cast each fall, but Mario and I had remained a constant. We made friends fast and formed little gangs the first week of school, like all Army brats do, but with the certainty that the job of finding a best friend had already been done.
Mario’s family moved first. We had them over for supper—Gina’s spaghetti and my mother’s zucchini bread—the night before they left. Our own house was already packed up, divided into the necessities that would go to West Germany with us and the things that we didn’t really need and would store somewhere in the States for three years.
“Like the Indians did,” Mario explained after supper, when we were huddled one last time under the porch. He had a pocket knife and Band-Aids, crumpled from being in his pocket all day. “They cut their hands and tied them together with leather straps.”
“Won’t it hurt?”
“I’ve got Band-Aids. Come on, it’s a ceremony.”
We loved ceremonies. Mario sometimes led Mass on the playground, and I liked to get our group of kids lined up at five o’clock when the post flag was lowered and retreat was broadcast from the speakers on the light posts, all of us standing at attention with our plastic guns on our shoulders. I couldn’t resist a ceremony, no matter how painful.
Mario went first, cutting quickly, a long trickle of red dribbling down his middle finger. He handed the knife to me, butt first like we’d learned in Cub Scouts, even though this ceremony violated all the rules of knife safety. I held the point to the pad of my finger, dimpling the flesh.
“Hurry up!” he hissed. “Before it dries!”
I held my breath and stabbed, then pulled quickly down. A gush of blood shot out and landed in the dust by my knee, and I dropped the knife. My head felt dizzy.
Mario grabbed my left hand and pressed his against it, palm to palm. He made a fist around our middle fingers and held tight. Not really aware that I was doing it, I traced my finger along the raised white scar over Mario’s right eye, those first six stitches that we earned together. Mario counted to twenty and let go.
“And that’s it,” he said, picking up the Band-Aids from the dirt. “We’re brothers forever.”
“Shouldn’t we wash them off?”
“Not yet—the blood has to work in.”
I wrapped the Band-Aid around my wound, wincing. It was tight enough that my fingertip was purple and numb. A little blood, I couldn’t say whose, dripped down my finger. I tentatively licked at it, tasking its warm saltiness.
It was pitch black now under the porch, certainly well past nine o’clock. Mario’s mother was calling his name. We scrambled out from under the porch, Mario swearing a little while he felt for the knife in the dirt.
The next afternoon I walked up to Mario’s house out of habit. The painting crew was already there, putting a fresh coat of off-white on the walls, windows thrown open. All evidence of the Capanellis was being erased.
I stood on the sidewalk, holding my still-throbbing finger, and cried. Three days later, we were on a plane to Frankfurt-am-Main, and I carried some of Mario’s blood with me in my veins.
Mario and I overlapped for three weeks the summer we turned twelve. We moved three times in Germany—Aschaffenburg, Schweinfurt, Wurzburg. The summer I turned eleven, we moved back to Kansas, this time to Fort Leavenworth, where my father was going to the Command and General Staff College.
I had friends, even best friends, in Germany—Danny Walsh, Eric Rodriguez, Tommy Cho—but I remained faithful to Mario. I never shared blood or scars with any of them.
In Kansas, I was mostly solitary. Once a week I rode my bike to the Stars and Stripes bookstore on post to spend my allowance on comic books. I admired Spider-Man for his wit and charm, but the Swamp Thing, tortured and longing for love in his body made of decaying plants, was my favorite.
Behind our house was an old railroad, the wooden ties long ago rotted away. I would walk along the track where it cut into sandstone bluffs and imagine the days when it had carried trains to St. Louis and Topeka. Sometimes I carried home heavy iron railroad spikes, or chunks of black coal cinders from those long dead iron horses.
My father’s next assignment was Fort Hood, Texas. By now I was an experienced mover; I hadn’t even unpacked many of the boxes that we took out of storage when we came back to Kansas. It saved me a lot of time.
Mario’s father was in the next class at CGSC, after two years at Fort Bragg and one at Fort Ord. They moved into a yellow townhouse three doors around the cul-de-sac from us. All of the townhouses were identical, duplexes sharing a party wall, painted alternating blue and yellow.
We had grown differently. I was a little taller, and skinny—my mother said I looked like a prisoner of war, with my bony elbows, sunken chest, and no belly to speak of. No matter how much I ate, I neither looked nor felt full. Mario was thin, too, but a lean, muscular thin. He had his father’s broad chest and thick, curly Sicilian hair. At twelve he already had the dark, musky magnetism that would make him the girls’ favorite at sixteen.
There were other differences, too. Mario was a natural athlete, excelling not just at his beloved baseball but at football and basketball, too. The sun loved him, kissing him to a polished bronze. I burned in the sun, turning lobster red with a spray of brown freckles at the first hint of sunlight. As for athletic ability, I was a failure—my father tried for a year to teach me to field a baseball, but my arms and legs were strung together on loose wires that sent me tumbling whenever I ran. He eventually accepted that I must have some other talent, though it remained hidden.
We sat uncomfortably on the stoop of Mario’s new home, sucking at bottles of root beer in the dusty heat. The smell of Coppertone hung thick around me.
“You on any teams?” he asked.
“Nah. I don’t really like playing sports. I’m not very good.” I picked at the label on my bottle. “You see any movies?”
“Sometimes. What have you seen?”
“I saw ‘Star Wars’ five times. I read that there’s going to be a second one.” Science fiction was my great addiction, my only passion. I had dissected “Star Wars” a million ways, read the book twice, and waited for the sequel with the same fervid and daily hope that some people waited for the Second Coming.
“I didn’t like it much,” Mario said.
“Oh.”
Mario’s eyes suddenly brightened and he grabbed my knee. “You’ve got to see what I found. In the dumpster.”
“What?”
“Come on.” He stood up and led me inside.
Dumpsters were magical places during the two or three weeks of summer rotation on an Army post. Families that were leaving unloaded the ballast of their possessions, and families that were arriving often discovered that their new quarters were too small to hold all they had accumulated. I had found old uniforms, cartons of comic books, porcelain beer steins, ashtrays with delicate Oriental paintings inside. All the junk of our far-flung empire made its way to those dumpsters.
Mario had only been in his new room for two days, but already he had hung up the Mets pennants that I remembered from Fort Riley. Beside them was a New York Nicks poster, and on the stack of cardboard boxes in the corner was a full-sized Jets helmet.
He closed the door behind us and knelt beside his bed. When he stood, he was holding a big stack of magazines bound with white twine. The one on top was a Playboy Christmas issue showing a woman from chin to breasts wearing a cleavage-enhancing Santa Claus jacket.
“I can’t believe someone threw these away,” he said as he set the magazines on his bed.
“Probably some guy’s wife found them,” I said.
“The Playboys are pretty tame.” Mario carefully untied the string and started laying the magazines out on his bedspread. They were a few years old, and looked like they’d been stored in a damp basement. Address labels still clung to some, and told the story of M. George’s Army career: lieutenant at Fort Benning, captain at Fort Knox, major at a base in Germany with an APO address. “The good stuff is at the bottom.”
He proudly held up a dog-eared magazine. On the cover was a woman leaning forward on her elbows, face turned to the camera in a grimace of pain or pleasure. Sweat had plastered her hair to her forehead and cheeks, and her breasts dangled freely below her. Behind her, just out of focus, were the muscular, hairy legs of a kneeling man. She wasn’t very pretty.
“I think it’s German,” Mario said.
“It’s Dutch.” When we lived in Germany, I had been appointed family translator—I was young enough that new languages came easily, so I cheerfully handled all the transactions we made when out among the natives. We vacationed in the Netherlands and Flemish Belgium one spring, and I found to my delight that I could make myself understood there as well, though not as completely.
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know.” I recognized the pronouns and articles that make up the glue of a language, but the verbs and nouns on this magazine were not part of my vocabulary. And there was no need to translate the universal word “SEX!” that screamed in red from the middle of the cover. “I only know a little Dutch.”
“These pictures are so hot!” Mario proclaimed.
He set the magazine on top of the Playboys and started to page through it while I stood over his shoulder. I had looked inside Playboys before—my friend Tommy Cho in Wurzburg knew which drawer his father hid them in, and sometimes after school we’d sneak a glance, always careful to put his socks and underwear back exactly as we’d found them. This magazine was different. None of the women were beautiful, and many weren’t even pretty. Little care had been taken in composing or editing the photographs, and none had been doctored to remove the veins and scars and dimples of fat that marred the human body outside of Playboy’s universe. And unlike a Playboy pictorial, which proceeded with a sort of strip-tease plot, there was build-up in to the flesh in this magazine: the pictures were all skin, immediately and abruptly exposed.
Also unlike Playboy, this magazine included pictures of men. They were incidental to the women, just props and bit characters, but they were there. I had never seen an erect penis before except my own, and I was both disgusted and thrilled by the sight. The mystery of penetration was not revealed in any of the pictures, but the abstract mechanics of sex took on a much more concrete reality for me on this magazine’s pages.
Two of the pages stuck together while Mario turned them, and made a crackly sound as they tore apart. Mario laughed. My stomach tightened as I realized that faceless Maj. M. George had spilled his semen across this magazine. The picture between the pages was of a pretty black-haired woman smiling at the camera, an erect and disembodied penis hovering by her cheek.
“Mario!” Gina called from nearby.
“Shit,” Mario whispered. He closed the magazine and jumped back, bumping into me. I turned my back to him and fled across the room.
“Mario! What are you boys up to?”
“Nothing, Mama!” he yelled. He scrambled to stack the magazines and shove them under his bed with none of the care he had used when he took them out. “Just unpacking!”
Gina knocked on the door but opened it without waiting for an answer. She poked her head in and smiled, her blonde hair framing her face with little wisps. I thought she was very pretty.
“The Carvers are coming over for dinner,” she said. “Matthew, would you like to stay over tonight?”
I nodded. I hoped she didn’t see the redness in my face, or if she did that she would assume it was sunburn.
After my parents went home and Gina had put away the dishes, Mario and I sat with Maj. Capanelli in front of the television with a bowl of popcorn. The tension of our reunion and the thrill of the magazine had ebbed. We watched the Royals play the Tigers in a game that stretched into long extra innings—I couldn’t play baseball myself, but I could appreciate it, and knew that this was a good game.
When the game finally ended well past midnight, Maj. Capanelli stretched out his arms, yawned, and excused himself for bed. I watched him go with a touch of dread—without him and the game, I wasn’t sure what Mario and I would talk about.
“What do you want to do?” Mario asked.
“I don’t know.” I faked a yawn. “I’m pretty tired.”
“Yeah, me too.” He stretched his legs out on the floor and raised his arms. Where his shirt lifted up I could see a new scar, a baseball-sized welt on his back above his waist. “When do you guys move?”
“Two weeks. My dad’s going the day after tomorrow, but our quarters aren’t open yet.”
“Anything fun to do here?”
“Not much. The Stars and Stripes and PX are pretty far. You can get up to the prison fence through the woods. And there’s an old railroad track out back. They say it’s haunted.”
“Uh huh.” Mario yawned, I think genuinely, but I wasn’t sure if it was from fatigue or boredom. “You can show me around a little tomorrow.”
“Sounds good.”
I followed him upstairs to his room. Gina had set out a pair of sleeping bags and pillows on the floor among the boxes. Mario sat on one and pulled off his shirt; my eyes were drawn to the bruise on his back and to his tan shoulder blades.
“I got hit sliding into second a few weeks ago,” he said. “Coach didn’t like us sliding, but I was safe. We lost anyway.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah. It was a good game, though.”
He pulled off his shoes, slid out of his shorts, and lay back on the sleeping bag. It was too hot to get inside. I turned off the light and got undressed, lying on top of my sleeping bag in my underwear. A droplet of sweat trickled across my chest.
I had been lying in silence, staring at the ceiling in the dim moonlight that seeped into the room, when Mario said, “Those magazines were so hot.”
“Uh huh,” I said. I closed my eyes and tried to wish away the memory of those pictures.
“Do you ever—you know?” he asked.
“No,” I lied. Of course I did, clumsily and as yet unsatisfactorily.
“Never?”
“Maybe sometimes.”
“You ever measure it?”
“No.” Another lie. I knew my measurements well, and mentally tracked my statistics. Sometimes I checked the old set of World Book Encyclopedias on my shelf to reassure myself that I was normal, at least physically.
“Well, I do. Five and a half inches. Want to see?”
I didn’t answer. I closed my eyes more tightly. I heard Mario shifting around on his sleeping bag.
After what seemed like a long time I opened one eye and looked over at Mario. In the dim light I could see his penis, purple glans and a sparse bristle of black hair on either side of his fist. It looked a lot like my own, which was reassuring.
“You ever kiss a girl?” I asked.
“Sure, a couple. Never got very far, though. You?”
“Once,” I said. I had lied enough now that another wouldn’t do any harm. “Jenny Parker. She’s moving to Washington.”
“She good looking?” Mario’s hand was opening and closing. I was suddenly very aware of my own penis.
“Yeah,” I said, sliding my own underwear off. I covered myself with my palm. “Really good looking.”
Mario was making an odd gasping sound that seemed to be coming from his chest. “I hope there are some good looking girls here. The girls at Fort Ord were really hot.”
I watched his hand sliding up and down. He was still making that sound. His eyes were closed.
“You’ll probably have lots of girlfriends,” I said, “you’re really good looking.”
He didn’t answer; he may not have heard me. The white scar above his eye seemed to shine in the moonlight, and I suddenly longed to kiss it. I reached over very slowly and touched it with my pinky.
Mario gasped, and I jerked my hand away as if his scar had burned me. His breathing relaxed, and I looked down his lean body at the shiny puddle on his navel.
“I hope they’re hot here, too,” he mumbled and rolled over, his back to me.
I breathed deeply to slow my heart and fell asleep watching the welt on his back move with his breathing.
Over the next two weeks, I saw Mario only three times. I showed him the railroad tracks, the junior high school, the place in the woods where the broad field outside the federal penitentiary was blocked by just a low chain link fence. I took him to the Stars and Stripes bookstore, where he looked longingly at the Playboy and Penthouse magazines just out of reach on the top shelf while I bought my weekly batch of comic books.
We never mentioned his magazines again. When he called the night before we left to invite me to sleep over, I said my leg was sore and stayed home. The morning the movers took the last of our boxes and furniture, he took me aside and slipped the battered Dutch magazine into my backpack between “The Incredible Hulk” and “Swamp Thing.” We shook hands, and I waved when my mother started the car and pointed us toward Texas.
Central Texas was not a good place to be young, shy, and possibly gay. Football was the official religion, and anyone who didn’t participate in that communion was suspect. I found a sort of salvation in band, and sublimated my confusion into mastering the trumpet. Bands played at the middle and high school football games, so I was able to be a part of the Church of Bear Bryant, if only tangentially.
The summer before ninth grade, the Killeen High School marching band director decided to move the first four chairs of the junior varsity brass sections up to varsity marching band. I had left middle school assigned to second chair JV, and suddenly found myself twelfth chair varsity. This felt like a demotion rather than an honor.
The benefit of varsity marching band, besides going to all of the away games and various drum corps competitions, was that it met the freshman phys ed requirement. We started practice three weeks before the school year began, we marched for an hour a day during school and two hours after, we did pushups if we fell out of step, we stood at games until our team scored. But I didn’t have to shower with boys.
During my sophomore year, I decided that I would force myself to be attracted to girls. I tried to develop a crush on several girls, and finally settled on Rebecca Stoltz, who played flute in concert band that winter. She was small and skinny, with short blonde hair and a plain but handsome face. I practiced writing her name in my notebooks like I’d seen other boys do, but I never found it stimulating.
I chose Rebecca because she was smart and funny, and a very talented musician, but also because no one else seemed interested in her. If it was hard to be a confused young man in a central Texas high school, it was even harder to be a plain young woman among the girls who grew up in beauty pageants and were groomed to be cheerleaders from their first steps.
I asked Rebecca to the basketball homecoming dance, and she accepted. She seemed surprised but pleased. My mother drove me to the high school, and she seemed equally surprised and pleased to be delivering me to my first date.
We danced a little, drank punch a little, and stared at the floor a lot. A half hour before her father was due to pick her up, we walked out to the shadowy space between the basketball gym and the band building.
“I had a good time tonight,” I said, kicking at the brown grass with my toe.
“Me too,” she said.
“We should do this again. Go to a dance. Or maybe a movie some time.”
“Uh huh.” She stepped a little closer to me, and our hands almost touched. “That would be nice.”
She was almost a full head shorter than me, so she had to stand on her toes when she kissed me. I kept my mouth closed even when I felt the tip of her tongue on my lips. I put my hands on her shoulders and thought about pushing her away.
“Don’t you like me?” she asked, breaking her kiss and dropping her heels back to the ground.
“Of course I do—I’m just a little nervous.”
She smiled and put her head against my chest. “Me too,” she said.
After I got home and went to my room, I took out Mario’s Dutch magazine from its hiding place in my closet. I covered the women in the pictures with my palm while I masturbated, and cried.
Mario moved to Fort Hood the summer before my junior year. Gina and my mother greeted each other like long lost sisters, but the brothers’ blood that Mario and I shared must have worked its way out in the nine years between Kansas and Texas. We acknowledged each other when the Capanellis came to our house for supper, but we didn’t have more than a dozen words to exchange.
He was still short, but his stringy boy muscles had grown thick and smooth. His face was even more handsome than I remembered: soft brown eyes, long Roman nose, an easy smile full of hard white teeth, all topped with that mane of curls. The scar above his eye had grown with him, and shone white beneath his hair, the only inch of him that wasn’t buffed to a glowing copper. He walked confidently, without swaggering, as if the world were his princedom and he its benign ruler.
Our last names put us in the same home room. I always sat at the front, having arrived at school an hour early for jazz band practice. Mario sat in the back with the other football players, in the middle of the morning’s social buzz. We would nod to each other as he came in, and when we passed each other in the halls, but otherwise our worlds didn’t overlap.
Rebecca was fascinated by him. She and I had been on a few more uncomfortable dates, but I was too busy fumbling with my own heart to fumble with her. Friendship was better for us both, though we didn’t actively discourage the persistent rumors that we were a couple.
“So, you two are blood brothers?” she asked when Mario passed us in the center courtyard at lunch.
I nodded. “Nine years ago.”
“Funny, you look nothing alike.”
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.” She touched my hand. “You’re handsome too, in a different way.”
“You should quit while you’re ahead.”
I envied Mario for his easy way with girls. Though I had no interest in them myself—I was secretly in love with the trombone player in jazz band, and ate fistfuls of Tums in the morning before practice to keep from throwing up when I saw him—I wished that they would show an interest in me. Girls giggled and blushed around Mario, and hung like wet sheets on his few words. He gave his big smile to them all, and rocked them gently in his soft brown eyes. I melted a little, too, when he stood nearby.
I never told Rebecca about our sleepover—sex just wasn’t in our vocabulary—but I told her about each of the scars that I had witnessed. She laughed when I told her how we all had wanted to touch them.
“Not much changes,” she said.
At a home game that fall, Mario earned a new scar. We were playing Copperas Cove, who led us by a game in the conference, and we were down by a field goal. Mario intercepted a pass—it looked almost like the ball had been intended for him, spiraling into his arms—and he charged like a small bull, head down, along the side of the field.
A giant from Copperas Cove, probably a rancher’s son who had been wrestling heifers since he could walk, slammed into Mario and sent him flying onto the blacktop track that circled the field. I was in the top row of the band bleachers, and could see the blood between his mouth and cheek in the floodlights when he stood up, still clutching the ball. The referee had to pry it from his hands.
Mario gained our team possession and twelve yards, but they still botched the game. At school the next day Mario had a white gauze pad on his left cheek, and his smile was obscured by the swelling of his lip. The girls stood around him in the hallway, clutching their books to their chests. No one asked me to tell the story.
Mario was called out of home room near the end of the year, during baseball season. He left with his easy gait and bright smile, slipping his ball cap onto his head when he got to the door. The story had spread through school by the end of second period that his father had been killed in a training accident.
My mother was working as a civilian nurse at the post hospital, in the cardiovascular unit. She dealt with old colonels and sergeant majors who came in for their second and third bypasses, policing the meals that their comrades tried to sneak in for fatty meats and chocolate cake. They were a little afraid of her. When the airlift helicopter brought Maj. Capanelli’s body to the roof, she rushed to the trauma unit, leaving a young student nurse to muddle with the charts and IVs.
Like most training accidents, it had been a combination of bad maintenance and dumb luck. Maj. Capanelli was with his tank unit on the gunnery range when a shell jammed in an Abrams tank’s cannon. When the gunner couldn’t clear the jam, he ordered him out and climbed into the turret himself. The shell blew back, killing him instantly.
My mother went with the casualty notification officer, a doctor on her unit, when he left to tell Gina. She was the one who had called the school, and she was still at the Capanelli house when I was called out after lunch.
Mario sat at the dining room table, still wearing his cap. He had his elbows on the table and was holding a picture of his father wearing a Little League coach uniform. Gina and my mother were on the couch, both still crying a little bit, going over the stack of paperwork the casualty officer had left. My mother’s Yankee practicality had kicked into high gear, and she was going to make damned sure that Gina and Mario got all the help from the Army that Dominic Capanelli’s twenty years of service had earned.
“Hey,” I said, sitting at the table across from Mario. He looked small, like a little boy in a baseball cap that he hadn’t grown into.
He nodded, only glancing up for an instant.
“I’m really sorry about your dad,” I said. “I liked him a lot.”
He nodded again, and then said, “I was supposed to pitch tonight. Dad was coming. I don’t think I’ll make it.”
“I guess not.”
“But I’ll be there next week.”
My mother had me come over because she thought I could talk to Mario, or maybe Mario could talk to me. He hadn’t said anything since he got home; he had gone to his room and returned a few minutes later with the picture. While our mothers sat on the couch, he sat at the table in silence.
But I had already said everything I knew how to say; the rest of what I felt didn’t have words. And the same was probably true for Mario. So we sat at the table and stared at the picture of Dominic Capanelli.
The army paid to fly Maj. Capanelli’s remains, along with Gina and Mario, to Long Island for burial. Mario came back to school the next week to finish out the year; he slept in my bed and I slept on the couch. Gina stayed behind with her mother-in-law, waiting for Mario to join her.
Mario pitched the last two games of the season. He was good; my father and I went to watch. After the games, he came straight home with us, and showered at our house.
At school, the harem of girls who used to follow him evaporated. In home room, he sat in the row behind me, quietly catching up on the week he had missed for his father’s funeral. At lunch, he sat in the courtyard with Rebecca and me, listening to our banter. No one wanted to touch his new scar except me.
The night before my father and I drove him to the airport in Austin, he sat on the couch with me to watch the Rangers. My father had put a six pack of Lone Star beer on the coffee table and winked before going off to bed.
“So, what are you going to do?” I asked at the top of the fourth inning.
He shrugged and sipped at his second beer. “Finish high school in Long Island. I think I’ll go to the Air Force Academy.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “Not as stuck up as West Point. You still going to be an archaeologist?”
I laughed. I had forgotten all about that plan.
“No,” I said. “Too much math. I think I’ll teach music.”
“You’d be good at that.”
“Thanks.”
“You going to marry Rebecca?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
He took a long sip of his beer. The Rangers struck out and took the field.
“You don’t really like girls,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Not really. Maybe not yet.”
“Maybe not ever?”
“I don’t know.”
“Too bad,” he said. “Rebecca really likes you.”
“You think so?”
“It’s pretty obvious.”
“Yeah. I’m really sorry about that.”
“She’ll get over it.” He opened another can. “Some of the guys at school think you’re queer.”
“I thought so. I don’t let it bother me much.” And I really didn’t. I had defined my life into small circles of band and Rebecca and schoolwork, and I was largely unaware of the world around me.
“You shouldn’t. They’re idiots. I tell them that you’ll be whatever you want to be and that I’ll kick their asses if they say anything to you.”
“Really? Thanks.”
“Hey, we’re brothers.” He held up his left middle finger. Though that cut almost ten years ago had been too shallow to leave a mark, I imagined that a scar remained somewhere beneath the skin. My own finger tingled.
I fell asleep some time during the seventh inning. When I woke up, Mario had gone to bed.
There were Christmas cards and graduation announcements and the occasional letter between my family and the Capanellis over the next few years. Mario went to the Air Force Academy as he had predicted; I went to the University of Minnesota and became a music teacher.
The year I graduated from high school, my father retired. My parents decided to move to Denver, a place neither had ever visited before, after they saw a show on PBS about the Rocky Mountains. It seemed as good a reason as any.
Mario and I never met, or spoke on the phone, or even wrote to each other. Gina included news about him in her holiday notes, as I suspect my mother did about me. She may or may not have mentioned Bill, whom I met my last year at the university, in the holiday letters. I didn’t mention him to my parents myself for almost a year, when they decided to visit me in our new home in Minneapolis and there was no way to hide his presence.
Mario and I probably wouldn’t have had lot to say to each other; it was enough to know that he was doing alright, and it may have been the same for him.
The air war started on a Wednesday night. I was trying to choose a third piece for the spring concert three months away from the sheaf of scores the previous band director had left, when the brief and abrupt announcement was made on CNN. Bill was at a candlelight peace vigil on the state capitol steps in St. Paul. After a few minutes, I changed the channel and watched “Nick at Nite” instead; I preferred “I Love Lucy” to the news.
When Bill got home after eleven, I had switched to a “Cheers” re-run. Occasional news updates, with jumpy film of ghostly buildings shaking under the impact of unseen explosions, interrupted the show. It was the Thanksgiving food-fight episode.
“Aren’t you watching the news?” he asked. He took off his heavy winter coat and sat down next to me on the couch.
“They break in when it’s important,” I said. I hit the mute button on the remote control. “I’ll catch the synopsis in the morning.”
“I just can’t believe they’re dropping bombs,” he said. Another update had broken in, with the same jittery footage and “Operation Desert Storm” logo as the last. I left the television muted. “What can that possibly solve?”
“Sure makes it hard to follow the show,” I said. The update finished and cut abruptly to a close up of Diane, in full Pilgrim costume, with mashed potatoes clinging to her nose.
I had met Bill the winter the Berlin Wall fell, at A Brother’s Touch, the gay bookstore on Hennepin Avenue. Though I was immediately attracted to his handsome face and thick blonde hair, it was his confidence and unflinching certainty that made me fall in love with him. I wished that I could be as brave as Bill, and I was when he held my hand on the path around Lake Calhoun and when he kissed me on the mouth outside the Loring Café.
Unfortunately, that courage was tangled up with his politics. He broadcast his opinions like an inflammatory bumper sticker. Most of my colleagues had no idea I was gay, and certainly didn’t know my thoughts on current events. We had a standing agreement, our domestic peace accord, that he would leave the politics at the front porch, but sometimes he forgot.
“Can we switch to CNN?” he asked.
“At the commercial. If you get me a beer.”
I traded the remote for a bottle of Summit and let him watch the news. Everyone at the CNN Center in Atlanta had gone home, I imagined, and left on a perpetual tape loop of the same footage of Baghdad at dawn, yellow and blue anti-aircraft tracers periodically hurling themselves across the pink and gray clouds. After I finished my beer, I stood and kissed Bill on the top of his head.
“I’m going to bed,” I said. “I’ve got school tomorrow.”
“Okay,” he answered without looking up—God forbid that he would miss a second of the war. “I’ll join you in a little while.”
It was two in the morning when Bill finally came to bed. I looked at the clock and covered my head with the pillow. My alarm was set for five.
By five thirty, I had finished my first cup of coffee on the porch and went back to the kitchen to get a second. It was cold on the porch, but I liked the quiet. Outside, snow capped the brittle stalks that had held cone flowers and bee balm in the front garden all summer. The ice tracings on the windows looked like maps of some unknown continent against the black morning sky.
We had bought our little house a year before, in a Minneapolis neighborhood that had seen better days. Our own block wasn’t bad, but on Chicago Avenue, two blocks west, the vice squad made a scheduled weekly sweep of hookers, johns, and drug dealers. They always came back a day or two later. On the salaries of a teacher and a civil engineer, though, we couldn’t afford this sort of house in a nicer neighborhood. We had hardwood floors, a claw foot tub, French windows on the porch and a fireplace in the living room. We felt a little like urban pioneers, breaking up the sod of blight and cutting a trail through the wilderness that others could follow. Bill hung a rainbow flag—my concession to his boldness—outside the porch as a beacon to the world.
Bill had left the television on when he went to bed. I took my second cup of coffee into the front bedroom that we used as a lounge and sat on the couch to catch the synopsis of the war so far. It took me a few moments to realize that the young man in the grainy picture on the television was Mario.
Bill clambered downstairs in his bathrobe at about seven o’clock. I was still on the couch.
“Have you taken your shower yet?” he asked.
I raised my hand to quiet him. Mario was on the television again. His face was badly bruised and his lips were swollen, but the white scar above his eye was just as I remembered it. I could barely make out his words under the whirring hum that marred the soundtrack: “Capt. Mario Dominic Capanelli, United States Air Force.” He had said those words over and over all morning as every channel replayed the scene.
“You know him?” Bill asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s not the Mario, is it?”
I nodded. The footage was from Iraqi television, their proud display of American pilots captured during the first night of bombing. There had been two.
“You see what I mean?” Bill said. “It solves nothing.”
“Shut up,” I said. I didn’t look at Bill, who stood in the doorway for a moment and then left. After a few minutes I heard the shower running.
It was eight o’clock on Long Island, but only six in Denver. I wondered, as I reached for the telephone, if Gina had called my mother yet, or if I would be the first to assure her that Mario was still alive.