Robert Boswell

Century's Son, Robert Boswell's most recent novel, is available from Picador Books. New stories: "City Bus" is forthcoming in Ploughshares. "Supreme Beings" recently in Epoch and was shortlisted for Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize. "Almost Not Beautiful" appeared in the Hayden's Ferry Review. Boswell recently edited an edition of The Colorado Review and contributed an introductory essay. Another essay and story are forthcoming in an anthology titled The Story Behind the Story.

The short story "Guests," which follows, first appeared in the Ploughshares. The guest editor was Lorrie Moore.

Guests

Bobby Bell’s fingers numbered four to a hand. His thumb and pointer were identical to God’s, but the others were just fleshy stubs, stunted and fused, and only two, on each slender paw. He was a dumb kid, besides, if progress in school is a fair measure. He sized me up my first week in town, then came by my locker to demand a fight, the fall of 1967.

We’d moved to New Mexico from Illinois because my father was sick. How the change was supposed to help, I didn’t know. When I asked, he removed his glasses as if the problem were with the black-rimmed lenses. His head tipped slightly on its thin scaffold of bone. I felt a corresponding tilt in my senses. “I’m host to a disease,” he said. A smile flickered across his lips.

I began to tremble.

He continued. “You could say it’s a landlord and tenant affair.” When he focused on my expression, his attitude shifted. He slipped the glasses on again, which made his eyes the wrong size for his face. “You’re worried.” His hand lighted like a butterfly upon my head. “All right. I’m host but there are no tenants, just uninvited guests, too small to see.” His lips crinkled, a modest grin. “Too small,” he assured me, “to even imagine.” His head tilted once more. “You won’t worry, all right?”

I promised.

I had inherited my father’s slight build, which must have cheered Bobby Bell, to think he’d found a frame, at last, more flimsy than his own. I colored easily, as well, which provided him a hope even he knew to leave unsaid: blood that surged so close to the surface would wet his wrinkled shirt, spatter his shoes and saturate the dirt where they paced. From the moment I met him, even before he required a fight, I understood that his world was neatly cleaved into those who could beat him and those he could enslave. The division, extravagantly uneven, presented him his quest – to find someone over whom he could have dominion – all of this written upon his face, as the truth of my father’s condition was written upon mine. Which might have been why Bobby Bell thought he had an edge, as I was taller and only barely thinner. Why would he think my eyes were asking to be blackened but for a father frail as a child’s pledge?

During that time, my mother came to my bed every night to take from me whatever book I was reading and point to the ticking clock above my head. She’d sit on the mattress and tell me how well my father was doing, how this move could make all the difference. “Friends will come,” she said the night before the fray, meaning that I would make some eventually, that perspective was the larger test – we were here to save a life, to protect him from the guests that lived within.

What a good boy I was, wanting to believe and then, after I no longer could, willing to pretend. When she left, shutting the door and light, the room drifted away in a darkness that knew no end, which I would close my eyes against, and wait for the smaller dark of sleep.

Later that night I woke and stumbled into the hall – disoriented, still in Illinois. Light at the far end of the house drew me. My mother knelt by the easy chair to fit a pillow beneath my father’s sleeping head. He wore the top to his striped pajamas, the dark hair on his thin legs exaggerated like the carbon filaments I moved with a magnet to whisker a cartoon face. Mother’s gown rose up her legs as they straightened, covering her to the hips, the tan of her legs ending abruptly in the buttocks’ white exclamation. I retreated to the hall, watching her float a flowered bed sheet over him, then touch her lips to his temple, her solemn nakedness like a holy garment – in itself a kind of prayer.

How distant I lived from Bobby Bell.

The fight I remember with a clarity that defies time, as if I had more than lived it, as if it had not yet happened. We met at the bus stop, two stupid savage children, enveloped by a crowd of onlookers I sensed more than saw. Bobby Bell pointed at my narrow chest. “Fairy,” he accused, a rage in his throat, an evil passion in his eyes. I had no decent reply, but spoke what first popped into my mouth. “Pixie,” I said, wanting to laugh, but the finger, that deformed hand thrown out at me, seemed a kind of reminder, like the mechanical voice in the underground that reminds you you’re on a train, like my father’s dry cough even on a morning following a shower, the sky pristine with sunlight and the cleansing smell of creosote.

We wrestled on a patch of ground made bare by children’s shoes, exhaust from the school bus lingering in the air. We lunged and grappled like things less than human. A friend of Bobby Bell’s invented a jeer. “You fucking Mr. Happy,” he yelled, his breath close and bitter, as if he might not be well.

Did my mother choose my father for his weakness, as Bobby Bell had chosen me? Is it cruel to suggest that she loved him most when he was his weakest? What of the girl, a few years later, who claimed to be drawn to my silence? Was she Bobby Bell in feminine guise, her white thighs holding me with such gentleness that I wept? What of the women I later met, who picked me less as a man than as a mission, and who I treated like guests who’d overstayed their welcome? I don’t understand the first thing about love, especially that first thing, when passion inhabits your body before you’re aware, a passion you come to detect by the symptoms that endure.

As it turned out, I was weaker than Bobby Bell could suppose, and quicker, too, throwing him to the dirt, shoving his nose against the hardened ground, the blood that colored his shirt, his own. I can still hear his single cry, as I bent his arm beneath my knee. His skull I tethered by his hair to my fist, and I might have gouged a hole with it, but his arm escaped. I had to make a dive.

Shall I attempt to describe the feel of that inhuman hand in mine?

“You’ve made your point,” another boy said, as if it were a debate I’d won.

I climbed off Bobby Bell and backed away, studying the crowd to see who might be pleased I’d won and who might jump me if I turned. That act of accidental compassion – my world, like Bobby Bell’s, cleaved – caused in me a peculiar response. I could see Bobby Bell, his body in a twisted sprawl, but I could not see the others. As if my vision had grown too small, I could not hold them in a single frame.

“That don’t make no never mind,” consoled his friend, touching the place on Bobby Bell where my knee had pinned his knobby spine. The others huddled – or hovered – about the fallen boy, but they were impossible to take in, the many guests, witnesses to that unfortunate accomplishment.

To be truthful, I’ve never had trouble imagining the small. I pictured the microscopic company my father kept with a clarity that was almost scientific. And I could see how, in Bobby Bell’s eyes, each thing claimed only the value of its use to him: a tool, or not a tool. Viewed in this fashion, all of creation could be made minuscule. How unlike Bobby Bell was my father, who always saw the other side even in his own slipping away. “Such beauty,” he said to me, gripping the rail of the bed. “I might have missed it otherwise.”

We’re forty-three now, Bobby Bell and I, wherever he lives, whatever small place he now calls his. We have our own uneasy children. And still, I can’t retreat far enough to see them all, those bodies assembled about the fallen one. How, precisely, do they gather? How, exactly, do they stand? I think it matters. Are they stooped or standing erect? Has one covered her ears, another closed his eyes? Does that head swivel to miss the farce? Or is she laughing, giant that she has become, at the grappling of such silly and malignant boys? I carry them all with me – a fist that rises in what might be fear, shoulders that turn in what might be submission, hands that rest on what might be knees.

He told me what threatened him was too small to imagine, as if, given this, I could be spared the rest, but it wasn’t the microbes that troubled me after his death. He had it wrong, my father and his tiny beings. The guests that stubbornly remain haunt us because they’re larger than visible things.

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Robert Boswell shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife Antonya Nelson. He also teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and at New Mexico State University in the new MFA Program.