It was a cool night in early winter. The first weekend in November. The sun had set as we walked to dinner that afternoon. Sitting by a huge pane of glass, we watched people pass on the sidewalk below, under the elegant street lights. The food was unexceptional, as usual. We had talked and laughed, then parted to put on warmer clothes and do some rushed homework.
Meeting again, a little more than an hour later, in the basement of the huge brick building with the false columns in front. About 15-20 people milling slowly about, talking, laughing.
I knew very few people, and ditto with Jon. But it didn't matter. We talked and stood closely together, by the wall, near the door. Small talk. How cold it was outside. Have you ever been on a hayride before? Look at those jerks over there. hey, I think I know that guy. Wow, I'd like to get to know her.
Finally, we all got organized. Filling up cars, we filed out of the parking lot, turning west in a convoy. Each driver had instructions on how to get to the farm, and we tried to stay together at first. But stop lights know these things and plot together to destroy any convoy, isolating those who will most freak about getting lost. That's why funerals get coppers to block intersections for them.
The night was as dark as the road, freshly resurfaced with asphalt since concrete broke up too much during these damned northern winters. Occasional clouds covered most of the few stars that could be seen through the glow and pollution of the city. Leaving town, we somehow very quickly came upon flat open ground. Fields began to reach away from the road. Clumps of low, twisted trees or tracts of tangled fallow earth bordered each man's property. I felt exposed, naked, unconfined; yet not quite free. Scary. Shadows blew quickly through the cropped stalks of harvested crops. I wondered what wild life managed to live out here. Rabbits, maybe. Skunks. Rats. Snakes. Deer?
Thirty minutes later, we pulled into the drive of a farm. A long, open stall held leftover pumpkins, and racks outside held up rows of fragrant Christmas trees. We stepped out of the car into gravel, locked and shut the door.
We gathered under the lights of the stall to wait for those who had fallen behind or gotten mildly lost. Finally, a rough motor started up somewhere behind us, and a loud crunching and popping preceded a tractor pulling a long bed of hay into the parking area. Floodlights atop the cab lit the longbed. The tractor eased to a stop and we surged forward to claim a space in the trailer. The tide of bodies reminded me of field trips from elementary school where we rushed to sit next to our favorite person in our favorite part of the bus -- the loud, rowdy kids in the back, beyond the wheel humps, and the uninvited in the front seats. Maybe not too near the front, where the teacher was...that said something about you.
Jon and I chose the front of the trailer, near the left side. Jon practically leapt in, then turned to help me climb in. Straw immediately began clinging to my wool coat and mittens. The unceasing breeze brushed Jon's hair back from his face and brought moisture to my contacted eyes. I reached over and teasingly zipped up his jacket and wrapped his black scarf around his face. Defiantly, he unzipped the jacket all the way, sticking out his chest, chin up, fists on his hips, proclaiming, "I'm not cold! I'm a manly man!" He always made me grin when he used that tone of voice. The jacket was a navy blue, waist-length winter flight jacket with a synthetic furry collar and a zippered pocket on the upper left arm. I loved that jacket. I stole it from him often. He liked to see me in it too... he liked it when i wore any of his clothes...something about me belonging to him, and then how it turned him on when women wore men's clothes.
But I hated what he wore under that jacket. The light blue t-shirt matched his cammo pants. After all, since cammo doesn't match anything at all, it goes well with everything. A green army beret with a circular button from a popular metal band finished off the outfit with his tan leather army/hiking boots which ended just below the tied ends of the cammo. I remember once in his dorm room, another visiter asked if he was in ROTC, there was so much para-military hanging on the cinderblock walls. "No, I'm just dangerous."
While people around us threw hay and sang Christmas songs, we sat close together and talked quietly. The trailer bounced along in deep ruts behind the roar of the tractor engine straining a bit under its load. The men driving the tractor would turn the floods out for a few seconds, then snap them back on, laughing, hoping to catch couples getting close. Nobody was that stupid. Public spectacle wasnt cool. Mud and puddles of brown slime gurgled and sloshed under the huge tires.
Stars were slightly more visible out here and we amused ourselves trying to remember names and shapes of distantly learned constellations. The ruralness was beginning to fill me with excitement, awe. Or maybe it was the chill wind that was steadliy creeping through my clothes. About a half hour into the slow crawl up and down slight hills and around a huge circle, the tractor stopped at the crest of a hill. We all stumbled numbly out of the trailer and pulled straw out of our hair and clothes to stop the itching. We were nowhere in sight of our site of origin. Slipping in about an inch of mud, we moved out of the trail onto some less slippery nondistinct vegetation, using it to clean off our shoes as best we could.
I stamped my feet, huddling behind Jon-my-windblock, and wondered what we were waiting around for when the smell of kerosene drifted to me. Very soon a large pile of damp corn stalks and husks before us was blazing warmly and brightly. Everyone's spirits lifted as we ringed the bonfire, shifting rapidly as huge billow of noxious black smoke rushed off the flailing wisps of orange and red and yellow.
Avoiding the smoke, kicking loose stalks into the fire, and turning over smoldering piles with our feet somehow slowly evolved into a wild dance that grew in its frenzy, climaxing with yelling and accepted dares to jump over the huge blaze. Gradually, the fire slept and then died and we all clambered back into the trailer and used straw to wipe the muddy cinders off our shoes before sitting cross-legged again. The tractor engine hacked to life, and jerked the trailer into forward motion, pushing everyone back into the straw.
Jon was quiet. "What are you thinking about?" I asked quietly.
"I was plotting."
"Plotting what?" I laughed.
"The overthrow of Chicago Proper."
"Oh! And who's going to overthrow all of Chicago Proper? You?!" "Well, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. Hm. I'll tell you anyway. Yes, me. And you can help me."
I was fascinated. "Ok. And just how do your propose to do this? And when are you going to start?" You. Not we. I'd have to hear this plan first.
"We'll take your car down the road a few miles and crash it. Bad enough that it would be convincing that it burned. Thumb down the next nice looking car, kill the driver and passengers, put them in your car. Light the car. You and I have effectively disappeared. Now we can go anywhere."
"How are you going to kill them so that it isn't obvious that they were murdered?" I interrupted.
"Rag Doll 'em."
"With what, " I said sarcastically, "a tire iron?"
"No. This." He slipped a butterfly knife out of the thigh pocket of his right pants leg.
"Oh. Ok. Go on. No, wait. Do you always carry around a concealed weapon??"
"Most of the time, so don't get us in trouble with the cops, ok?" His eyes glinted in the floods. Don't get us in trouble with the cops? First he wants to junk my car, then kill at least one person on his way to take over a major metropolis, and he doesn't want ME to get us in trouble with the cops??
"Anyway, we drive into Chicago and sell the car. On the black market obviously, just in case you were going to ask. With the money, we buy drugs. We then sell these drugs, absolutely do not touch them ourselves, take over larger and larger rings and before you know it, we rule C.P."
"Uh huh. Very interesting." He was teasing. Or psycho. So I responded in a sugary sweet voice, "It's okay, Jon. I'll take care of you. Let me just go make a quick little phone call and the nice white men in their nice white coats will come take you away to a nice white room with padded walls. You can have your own nice white jacket, and eat crayons, and I'll come visit you everyday."
"Do they have black crayons?" He asked impishly.
"Sure. You can even have all my black crayons if you give me all the pink ones." I patted his hand.
"Cool!! When do I go?"
I looked at him staring back at me with ultra-innocent eyes and a young child's excited face. Enchantment fell over me. Dreamily, I reached out slowly and took his left hand in my right, weaving my fingers into his. Oh God, our hands are touching!! We kept silent the rest of the way back to the parking lot of the farm. Silent, that is, except for the clicking of my chattering teeth.
The roar stopped and twenty frozen bodies got carefully out and ran to the shed where hot cider and cocoa were being served. The laughter resumed as fingers melted around styrofoam cups of liquid that evaporated as quickly as it was being downed. Jon and I slipped off to my car as soon as we had warmed up a touch.
I backtracked our path to the farm by turning at landmarks I had noted along the way. I was a good navigator. Take me anywhere once and I could get home from there with out any help and return there within a few days without needing directions again. Names of roads didn't matter too much. Trees, rocks, shapes of intersections, size and quality of the road, the buildings did. I'd heard it was different with guys . . . that landmarks were irrelevant to them, but road names were important. Oh well, their loss. Maybe that explained why they got lost so easily and so often -- its impossible to see road names on a black Illinois night.
It was still relatively early when we returned to campus, so I invited Jon back to my room. It was Friday night, Elliot dorm was open til midnight. He accepted, which was good because I had specially cleaned up my room to entertain guests. It was the first time he had been in my room, so I gave him a sort of tour, explaining who the people in the pictures were, why I had the posters I did, etc.
Not wanting to seem too forward, I sat down on the floor beside the bed, after turning on the hard rock show on the campus radio station and flipping off the overhead light to accent the blinking white Christmas tree lights I had draped around the room like a private collection of dwarf stars.
Straw now littered the floor, along with chunks of mud that had finally dried enough to spontaneously fall off our shoes. He sat agonizingly close as we looked at my photo albums. His skin was still tanned from summer, while mine, pale to start with, had faded to creamy ghost white.
The radiator in the room popped and hissed. I kept it turned up so that the room felt like late summer, especially when the door had to be left open which let out all the heat. Slowly, outer layers that had protected from the cold were shed. He had gorgeous arm muscles under the sleeves of his t-shirt. Running his hands through his hair to get it out of his face, he found that bits of straw were tangled in it. He asked me to pull them out before they made really painful rats nests. I got up and sat behind him on the bed to run my hands through his hair, which nearly touched his shoulders. It was thick, straight, and rich. I unconsciously began playing with his hair, combing it with my fingers, braiding small strands of it, pulling it back into a tail.