Dormitory

by Michael W. Cox           

The Eagle’s Nest occupied the third floor of an old factory. Boys walked up wide steel stairs to get there, past dirty windows showing old looms on the first floor and bald manikins on the second, the building shaped like a box. The men’s dormitory was built like an E lying on its back, with entryways lining its interior, streets running three sides of it, and a dumpster-filled alleyway behind, where vagrants slept at night. On the plaza outside the dorm, protesters marched against the war. Long hair, scraggly beards, blue jeans, black boots—you couldn’t tell them from the vagrants.

Fresh off the bus, Teddy absorbed all this in his first thirty-six hours in Morgantown. Thereafter, if he wasn’t in class or at the library, he’d be at the Eagle’s Nest drinking quarter beers, or in his dorm room staring at protesters on the plaza. That school year he would stick to interiors, though he’d grown up hiking, hunting, fishing, camping out—anything to avoid his parents; anything to find a place to drink or friend to meet when darkness fell. He bagged an owl once at dusk. Cut off a wing. Kept it in his drawer till James, his father, found it and asked what it was and just what it was he was thinking when he brought the thing down. That was a bad time; he had to give up hunting.

It was his grandfather, dead now, who had introduced him to the sport. He, at least, was always glad to spend a little time with him. He, at least, cared about the things he could do. “Here’s a little nip for the cold,” he’d say at 4:00 a.m., start of buck season, passing him his canteen.

Awash in rifle shots and manikins, old man booze and quarter beers, Teddy’s head was pounding. He could taste vomit and guessed that somewhere in the night he’d retched. He opened his eyes to see his roommate sitting on his bed across the room, staring at him. Then he saw it was 9:30, he’d badly overslept. He pushed himself upright, dragging his pillow behind him to prop against the wall.

“You came in drunk at three this morning and tried to get into bed with me,” Chad said.

He wasn’t smiling; it was no joke.

Teddy scrunched his eyebrows but drew a blank. Couldn’t recall how he got from the Nest to his dorm room, couldn’t pull in one dark corner of the street or stairwell or manikin draped in a sheet. “God, I was drunk and confused, that’s all. You should’ve just pointed me to my bed.”

“I did. But you insisted you were in love with me and wouldn’t budge.”

It was true. Not quite love, more like a crush, something he’d tried to get past. He felt it the moment they shook hands out in the front room his first day on campus, and he couldn’t make it go away, he could only hide it.

Chad told him he refused to room with a homosexual. Told him go see Mr. MacDougal, at the Housing Office. Told him he had to move out. “Today!”

“But I’m not gay.”

“You are, Teddy. You just don’t know it. Pack your things. And clean up the bathroom. I’ve been breathing through my mouth all morning.”

Then Chad went to class, leaving Teddy to his mess. He vomited again when he saw the floor around the toilet. He found aspirin in the medicine cabinet and dug up a roll of paper towels and some Clorox from beneath his bed. Sopped it up piece by piece. Poured water on it and sopped again and bagged it. Then he got dressed and made it to his 11:00 a.m. class, basic statistics, the one class he loved this semester. For fifty minutes he was able to forget his misery in the Rorschach of scatter plots, but it bit him again when he ate toast and drank tea in the food hall, where he saw Ray and Sal looking his way with what appeared to be hatred. They knew. They’d heard. When he stepped outside he could see the protesters on the plaza again, shouting down a balding administrator who kept raising his arms and shouting please, please!

At 1:00 p.m. he was sitting in Mr. MacDougal’s office.

“Chad called first thing this morning and told us all about you. Then he came by and filled out the form.”

MacDougal pulled up his clipboard and looked at it again, reading, nodding, then shaking his head.

“Son, do you need counseling? For alcohol?”

He felt ashamed. “No, sir. That’s my only slip this year.”

“But do you like drinking? Do you think about it?”

“I’m a college freshman and the drinking age is eighteen, what do you think?”

MacDougal grinned.

“Well, if you find that you need counseling, I can get you in at the counseling center. Now, as for the room change, normally it’s the person filing the report who makes the move—if there’s a room available, that is. We have a room, but Chad made it clear he wants to remain right where he is for the last five weeks of the term. We understand that you have a lot less stuff, so we’re moving you, all right?”

“Sure. But I’m not gay.”

MacDougal told him nobody said he was. Then he gave him a key to his new room, five flat boxes, and a roll of tape. “Be out by 5:00. That’s when he plans to be back.”

He realized he’d have to miss his afternoon class.

Then the shouting on the plaza got louder.

“Is anyone ever going to do anything about those protesters out there?”

MacDougal looked at him. “They have a right to be there.”

“God, if my grandfather were here—” Teddy choked it off.

“If your grandfather were here, what?”

He’d killed a lot of Germans in the First World War. Potted them with his rifle. Killed five men in all. They gave him a medal.

“Nothing,” Teddy said. “Nothing.”

He went to his room to pack.

The knock on his door came at 2:00 p.m.—the Queer Caller, a boy in the dorm who banged on your door twice, shouted “Queer,” then ran. No one was sure, exactly, who it was, but he’d been tormenting a pair of boys who lived on the first floor of the entry all term. Teddy had a pretty good idea, though, so he tore out of the room and ran up two flights of stairs to knock on Ray and Sal’s door. He heard scuffling shoes inside and a door close, so he knocked again louder. Then a third time, even louder.

“Can I come in?”

“I’m studying,” Sal said.

“Let me come in,” and Sal let him in the room and told him to take a seat. He could hear the shower running.

“Why’d you knock on my door?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then why did Ray knock on my door?”

“I don’t know what you mean. We’ve been here for an hour.”

“I didn’t say when the knock came, did I?”

Sal looked scared.

“If Ray ever comes out of that shower, tell him not to knock on my door again. Also, tell him I reported him to Mr. MacDougal.”

And then he left and finished packing and carried the boxes one at a time to his new room two entryways down. His last trip was for his backpack and duffel bag from home. Then he sat there on his new bed, looking at his new room, which was actually two smaller rooms that contained, in sum, two beds, two desks, two chairs, and a small table in the front room and plenty of closet space. The view out the window looked not at the plaza, like his old window, but onto a courtyard where there was an oak tree with light green leaves only a week old. He saw that he’d have to share the bathroom, but that was okay. He made a mental note not to get drunk the rest of the term. Tonight would be different. No Eagle’s Nest. He’d stay in and do his homework and call one friend to get notes for the 9:00 a.m. and another friend for the 3:00 p.m. he’d missed.

He went to Burger King that evening instead of the food hall, getting a Whopper, fries, and shake. A girl he’d met last term in College Algebra sat near him. She tried to talk but he wasn’t much interested. She said she was sorry for what happened, and Teddy didn’t want to ask how she found out.

“You can talk to me, if you need.”

“About what?”

“It doesn’t bother me if you’re gay.”

“I’m not gay,” Teddy said.

“It’s okay if you are,” she said, and Teddy dropped it and tried not to look at her as he finished his food. Eventually she left.

Years later he’d look back on all this and thank God he wasn’t eighteen years old anymore. He barely spoke to his parents, and he had already lined up a job in town at a hardware store, so he wouldn’t have to move back home for the summer. He’d have to find an apartment, though, and time was running out to find a roommate. He’d figure it out.

At ten that night he called home and spoke to his mother, to give her his new address and phone number. It didn’t make him happy to talk to her, but he figured she should know.

“Do you want to talk to your father?” she asked.

“No,” he said. James was the last person he wanted to talk to. His mother was the second to last.

“How about your little brother? He wonders about you up there at school.”

“Tell Zach I’m all right. Classes are good.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“You’re not drinking too much these days, are you? That’s under control, right?”

He hedged. She pressed him about why he had to leave his old room, so he told her part of it, the part about coming in drunk and vomiting all over the bathroom.

She listened to everything he said.

“Go to church, honey. That’s all I can tell you. Go to church.”

“What about counseling?” he asked.

“Then do that, if you won’t go to church.”

Teddy told her he had to get off the phone. He had to study. Then he turned off his light and pushed aside his curtains in the dark, and he could see, down in the courtyard, his ex-roommate and Ray and Sal talking to a pair of boys from his new entry, one smoking a joint and passing it to his buddy, who turned and pointed up at his window. They all looked up. Ray cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted a single word that echoed in the courtyard. Then Chad, Ray, and Sal each took a hit in turn, and after a minute, all five boys standing down there in the courtyard were laughing. He found his old scope in the underwear drawer beneath a T-shirt. Took it to the window and spotted them beneath a cone of light. He lined up the cross hairs and wondered how his father had lived with it. Then he wondered how his grandfather figured in. Where had it come from?

They laughed again down there. Ray looked up and cupped his hands to his mouth again, the cross hairs on the gumline at the part between his teeth.

“Pow,” Teddy said. Then: “Pow, pow, pow, pow,” blasting each twisted face in turn.

 

Michael W. Cox’s fiction has been published in such venues as ACM, BULL, Columbia, minnesota review, and storySouth; his nonfiction has appeared in Best American Essays, River Teeth, Sport Literate, and the New York Times Magazine. His earlier books include Against the Hidden River, a story collection, and The Best Way to Get Even, a novel, both from Mammoth Press.