Tales Out of School by Benjamin Taylor

Author:Benjamin Taylor [Taylor, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Coming-of-age
ISBN: 9780446672696
Google: mFFfjgufnsgC
Publisher: Warner Books
Published: 1995-09-30T14:00:00+00:00

Murph smoked hard, waiting for Truley’s answer. About the boathouse. It had an ingle where you could cook. It had a well out back with a working windlass. It had a plank bed (admittedly very uncomfortable—Truley had taken several nasty splinters from lying there). A man could live at the boathouse. Just supposably, he could.

“Give him the boathouse?” cried Truley. “When what we ought to be doing is calling the law? Let me at that telephone!” She crossed into the hallway with big strides. She unhooked the receiver. Fiercely she cranked, then waited for the familiar voice. “Hello, Central, put me through to—”

But right behind came Murph to snatch away the earpiece and hang it back up. “Suddenly we’re an armed camp, we’re scared of strangers? You listen to me, girlie,” she said. “ A stranger’s got rights too, kind that aren’t written down anywhere. And they’re all he’s got. I say the proper thing is to march ourselves out onto that porch and give directions to Offatts and say, ‘Mister, you make yourself snug as a hen in pease-straw.’ I say that’s the proper thing.”

“But for how long, Etta?”

“For the duration.” Meaning: this was an old man, a conspicuously old man.

Miss Truley gave, after hemming and hawing, her customary one-shouldered shrug—of assent. You might as well argue with a switch engine as Etta Murph once her mind was settled. Back out front they came now. Felix and the stranger had seated themselves in the front yard under a spreading box elder, beautiful in this season with its yellow keys shagging the limbs. Shadows played checkerwise on the faces of the boy and old man. And what was that held between them in the stranger’s open palm? It might have been a miniature person, a homunculus. But in the stranger’s open palm was no homunculus. Here was instead a finger puppet—of heartstopping verisimilitude, dressed in minikin finery and placing now an arm at his waist, bowing deep to greet the ladies. His lips were bloody red over random teeth, his tongue slewed out to one side. The mouth of a debauchee. He had a tallow complexion and scooped cheeks. But the eyes, two little furnace doors flung open, bade defiance. The ladies passed each other looks. “Is that thing alive?” whispered Truley. The finger puppet beckoned them down the front steps and across the lawn, spreading bedizened hands to indicate that Murph and Truley should come and have a seat, come and join them.

Bob, who had watched all this from under the house, scrambled forth to complete the circle.

Then, very calmly, the puppet took off his face—took it right off, as if it were his hat, and revealed the plaster blank, the nothing underneath. He briefly rockabyed the tallow-colored visage in his arms, then with sudden unconcern handed it to Murph. From the black velvet folds of his robe he now produced a new face and tried it on.

Truley shook her spellbound head. “Felix, honey, that’s you. Isn’t it, Etta, isn’t it just Felix all over?”

It was Felix, to the life.

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