Dog on the Cross Read Online Free

sex.
    Small-town idyll: the drive-in in midsummer, large screen flickering, speaker balanced on half-rolled window, two couples amorous, oblivious of whereabouts. Wisnat is behind the steering wheel, grown to well over six feet, seventeen years of age, thick haired and muscular. The young lady (two years his senior) sits almost in his lap. She gropes and caresses, acts on him, he the disinterested watcher of this play, hands loosely on her back, sad eyes open, reflecting the scene. He seems not to be mindful—she no more to him than an item in a series and,
after all,
thinks Jansen,
is he any more to her?
Wisnat looks forward to the next, past the robotic arms and pulleys, down the assembly line, and seeing them extend into the hazed horizon, his eyes are a little less sad—the dream of one to whom he will be more than just an achievement, whose survival will dependon him, this illumines the darkness, makes it bearable.
Perhaps for a moment,
muses Jansen, who in the backseat is likewise engaged. Jansen peers over the shoulder of his date and into the rearview mirror to see Wisnat’s strange expression (open-eyed, unfocused, fogged by dream), watching his friend carefully, praying that the girl he is kissing does not open her painted eyes.
    T HEN THE COLLEGE years. University of Oklahoma. Jansen majoring in hotel management, Wisnat in business. They lived together in an apartment complex: single bedroom with bath and kitchen, balcony overlooking the division’s pool. Summer and spring, Wisnat held forth from this gallery, occasionally settling his beer in his lap to wave up the women who would be sunbathing below, waiting, it seemed to Jansen, only for invitation. He would open the door and lead them out to Wisnat—brows drooping at the sides of his sunglasses—then go back and sit in his recliner to observe. Sometimes the newly introduced couple would make their way back through the sliding glass doors, across the carpet, down the hall to the bedroom. Jansen registered every moan of mouth and squeak of springs, calmly recorded them, smiling. He would match eyes with Wisnat when he emerged, an inquisitive look on his face yet hardly one of annoyance.
    Though one might have thought these trysts wouldmake Jansen writhe with jealousy or, at the very least be reluctant to assist with his friend’s seductions, the converse was true. Jansen misjudged Wisnat’s desire as he misjudged his own (even then the belief that he was homosexual plagued him, and he would push it away with flawed syllogisms:
I am not gay, gays are interested in sex. I am only in love
). He envisioned Wisnat’s libido a pit, not bottomless but very large. When that pit was full (the quicker it was full), Jansen thought he might profess his feelings and be met with something other than a blank stare or fist. As he led each woman onto the balcony, Jansen pictured a pile of female bodies slowly rising, torso by torso, ineluctably filling the chasm in Wisnat’s cratered soul.
    A month into his junior year (the pit’s bottom, he’d decided, was beginning to come into sight), Jansen’s father died. Six months later, his mother followed. He stood above her grave with Wisnat’s hand on his shoulder (the young man’s eyes still sadder than those of his mourning friend), thumbing, in his pocket, the insurance check he’d just been handed. They made the hour’s drive from Perser back to Norman: silence, whirring of tires on imperfect stretches of pavement, more silence. Back in their apartment, Jansen went into the bathroom and, cupping water to his face, found several strands of black hair wound around the stopper. He unspooled them, checkedthem against his own, turned on the overhead light and began to examine his scalp. Though his hair was relatively thick, though he had just come from the funeral of his mother, an additional worry began to shudder through him. The grief of loved ones gone and the