Bereavements by Richard Lortz Read Free Book Online Page A

belongs.”
    He paused, giving himself time to recover, knowing the dizzying blood-rush quality of his rage and its dangerous potential, then made a display of indifference and ease, settling comfortably and self-loved into his own fine, handsome body, brushing the wetness from his chest.
    “So tell me. What’s a composition?”
    Angel was amazed. His father sometimes really could be shit-dumb.
    “It’s a . . . ” He shrugged, impatient. “How can I explain? It’s jus’ some . . . writing: your thoughts and ideas about things, your impressions. Like—” (affecting exhausted boredom) “like—‘What I Did On My Summer Vacation’ . . . ‘My Visit To My Grandmother’s’ . . . ‘A Walk Through Central Park.’ ”
    Aurelio’s body suddenly gyrated like a puppet with its strings tangled, his mouth wide open and explosive with exaggerated laughter.
    “You —! A walk through Central Park! Don’t make it at night, love. Sweet, juicy chicken like you gets laid, maybe gang-banged. They rape boys, y’know.” And with a fake leer—“What’s a’ difference?”
    Aurelio’s deliberate confusion of sex, the reference to an easy interchange of male and female roles, frightened and infuriated Angel, but kept occurring so frequently he had learned to live with it, half pushing it down into the place where he kept all the things he dared not to think about too clearly.
    “Besides,” Aurelio went on, but not without a sly, sidelong glance which he plainly wanted the boy to see, “that’s a essay; essay, you ass-headed kid. Composition is in painting; it’s like when you say—” and his mocking manner now became put-on fairy and fancy “—like when you say the composition in this here painting is good.’ ” Again manly, with a half-shout, as if angry: “Or’ it ain’t good!’ You don’t write no goddamn composition.”
    “Auri—” which was what Angel had learned to call his father, “it’s the same word but a different meaning.”
    Hands thrown, the boy pretended to “give up.” “Okay. So I’m writing ‘a’ es-say.”
    Aurelio scratched thoughtfully around his navel, allowed a thick calloused hand a moment’s loving, possessive pressure over the heavy mass between his legs.
    “On what?” he demanded. “You ain’t got no grandmother.”
    The man was clearly out to needle him tonight, and now, for the first time, Angel realized that Auri had known all along what a composition was. He was sparring—always so neat, so slick. He could have Angel dancing around in the ring without even knowing it.
    “And when you did,” his father continued with a big white-toothed teasing smile, “when you had a grandmother—on your mother’s side, she was black.”
    Always a reference to his blackness, as if he cared. Angel was fairer in skin than Aurelio, but perhaps not if he stayed as much in the sun; and if the blackness came out at all, it was in the small fullness of the mouth, his very slightly broad and flattened nose, but most of all in the hair; Aurelio’s was thick, heavy, straight, blue-black, fine; Angel’s was a dark cocoa brown with a tight if not kinky curl that made the most flattering and (he thought) impressive “in”-way to wear it, a modest Afro. To complete the disguise, he’d had his left ear pierced; in it he sometimes wore a tiny seed of silvered metal, or, on rare occasions, just for fun, or when there were rumors of an impending street fight, a thin, dangling, almost inch-long coke spoon. This, of course, he didn’t dare wear to school, and to let his father see it was to risk getting the shit kicked out of him.
    “Why don’t you,” Aurelio continued, considering, his expression and posture one of put-on concentration, “write about what we’ve got holed up in there”—pointing toward the crack of light from the bedroom at the end of the long dark hall. “Maybe Miss Nosey-ass Evans would like to know a little more about the seamy, sad, sordid side a’