Finding a Home in the Vestibule.

I don't feel good in a big crowd since the Rodent got back in. They used to move amongst us, now we move amongst them.

Nobody ever told that kid from El Salvador that what he was doing was wrong.

It was a summer of Saturday nights, or a series of dreary, sloppy-minded Sunday mornings. It's hard to say which. It was woven into the fabric of our fantasies. We were living through insipid days.

And nobody thought about Salvador. He was just a kid with a body and a moustache. The girls couldn't believe their collective luck. Here was a boy who was handsome, firm and completely dumb. Cut off by the language barrier.

His currency was in body language. He was a freelance communicator.

If we had qualms about this, none of us showed it. Jackie said he was an amateur boxer with a pedigree. I told Jackie that Cuba was the amateur boxing capital of the world; El Salvador may as well be some back country town in New Zealand. Napier, or Waipukurau. No one from Waipukurau could throw a knock-out punch, unless he was fighting big brother from Napier.

We were made for ignorance. Not born for it, just accustomed to its sleuthing. It infiltrated us so easily because we were so blithely unprepared. Ignorance has great leverage amongst teenage boys.

So we called him Salvador, and he fucked our girlfriends. We fucked them too, but it was only incidental. They thought of him throughout, and we thought of nothing much. Small towns, huh? Breeding grounds for swine.

Jackie - who was a guy with a girls' name, and therefore a soft-cock - told us that Salvador was in New Zealand because he was smart, and talented, and he was on an exchange. Jackie knew because Salvador lived with him and his folks. Jackie knew more than we cared to ask about Salvador. We were licked.

***

I was drinking in the barn with the aim of not being able to feel my face. I supplemented the beer that Jackie's older brother bought us with Codeine pills. I intended not to see what was coming. My moral conscience was counter-productive in this town, and it could be silenced with stolen painkillers and drink.

No one was about to pin a medal for heroism on my chest. If there was a war on - which there was, it just hadn't affected me - I'd have skipped the draft.

Jackie sat next to me and mumbled something about a bad vibe in the barn. I told him I felt nothing, not even my own face. Jackie just stared at me and a look of derision rolled across his face in a heaving wave of disgust. Jackie told me he pitied me, and left me to bang my numb face against the wooden barn wall.

***

The problem with small towns is there's all sorts of loathsome shit going on. Incest, bestiality, racist hate crimes perpetrated by boars who swill from cans and squeal in each others' faces before attacking a lone brown face like a pack of sex-starved lifers.

The Mayor had a thirteen year old mistress who could wrap her legs behind her head, and all of us, bar Jackie, thought that sounded pretty damn neat. We contended that the job of Mayor was a benchmark to aim for, though none of us would ever get off our arses long enough to give it a try.

And we'd laugh because it was true, and laughing meant less thinking where we came from.

It was two months after September 11th. We made jokes about living in caves and riding camels. We cocked our heads and craned our necks if we heard a plane fly overhead, before someone would try to wager a twenty that the folks on that plane were on an uncharted flight to the Sky Tower.

Terror was in the faces of the Middle Eastern dairy owners. They packed up and shipped back to the desert not long after Salvador arrived.

We drank whiskey and smashed their windows in with river stones the night before they left. Sweet home...

***

My zipper wouldn't open and I was about to piss down the inside of my leg. I was fumbling with my crotch beside the barn and I could hear a girl giggling away in the shadow not 30 metres from where I stood. I listened to her purring and gleefully squeaking as my zipper mercifully gave way and I pissed with abandon, tracing large letters with arcs of recycled beer. I heard a low chuckle, and I knew Salvador was somewhere in that shadow with his shirt off, some girl's hands against his skin, staring in wide-eyed wonder at his exotic body.

I yelled some encouragement as I teetered back to the barn, but received only the girl's breathless giggles in return.

Jackie was inside the barn, pleading with one of the boys who was holding his father's shotgun and looking feverish, clearly insane, jacked on home brew. Everybody looked drunk and dumb. Every single person was a maniac. I summed up the situation quickly, turned around and left.

Voices chased me down the driveway, clawed at my back, made the cattle uneasy. I heard Jackie talking loudly but calmly. Voice of reason, Jackie. I trusted Jackie to patch things up. He'd done it before. He was reliable.

When the first shot pierced the night, I began to jog, and before I knew it I was sprinting away.

I didn't hear Jackie anymore.

***

More at a later date. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a year.

Do you hear what isn't said?