At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [193]
“So have you. You have three growing.”
He laughed and Jim laughed too. Jim finished with the flutes, running a cloth through the sections. He said, “I didn’t expect you’d be in a uniform.”
Doyler stood straight and squared his shoulders. “Am I handsome or what?”
“Throwing shapes, so you are.”
“And yourself in your breeches. They’re gone too small for you now.”
Jim lowered his head, feeling the passage of Doyler’s eyes. His hand smoothed the crease of his knee, wet from the flute. Doyler said, “But I always preferred you in your breeches.”
Jim peeked up through the strands of his hair. “You never told me that before.”
“Did I not? I might have.” Doyler rubbed his nose, finger and thumb, like a snuffers. “Lookat, I’ll go back into town. I’ll be out again tomorrow, promise.”
“You said you’d be staying.”
“I’m saying I could go back. If you wanted like.”
“Don’t be saying that, Doyler. You wouldn’t leave now.”
“No.” Again he fretted with his nose. “Where’d you stow me rifle anyway?”
“It’s safe,” said Jim. “Help me out with the bed.”
His father returned, making low inward mouth-music. He played with lighting his candle while they undressed to their shirts. They climbed in the bed, head and toe, and his father said, “What’s this, no prayers?” They had to climb out again and kneel on the floor. Doyler hid a claub of laughing behind his hands. Jim blessed himself and they clambered once more in the bed.
“Goodnight so, boys. Sure you won’t stay awake gostering all hours?”
“No, Da.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Mack, and thanks now.”
“Not a word.”
The gas came down, the stairs door closed. Jim heard the steady tramp above, the weary grievance of his father’s bed. The legs beside him stretched and he squinched up by the wall to make room. Out from the dark Doyler said, “Your feet’ll froze me. And you know what? They smell and all.”
“Yours are no soap.”
The covers threw back and Doyler’s shirt was shimmering by the window. The blind eased up. “There’s no moon,” he said, “but it’s better open.” He knelt there a moment. He appeared to rise in the air: it was his shirt pulling off. “Shift over,” he said. Feet traveled Jim’s legs in drifts of warm and ice, then Doyler lay beside. He pinched Jim’s shirt. “Take it off.”
Jim pulled the shirt over his head. When he lay back, Doyler’s arm was waiting on the pillow. It turned him in its hold. “Now we’re settled,” Doyler said.
“We are too.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No, it’s lovely.”
He cuddled over Doyler’s chest. His head lifted and dropped with each breath. He listened to the pump of the heart. His hand had fallen on Doyler’s side. Now he strayed it up his arm, fingering the hairs in the sneak of his armpit, then up along the shoulder. There was a feeling in this touch, yellow and soft, that was very like the color of candle-light. He found the leather string round Doyler’s neck, and he traced it along, on past his scapular, till he touched the half of a medal.
“It’s there,” said Doyler, “never fear.”
“Sure I knew that.”
Then Jim was telling, he didn’t know why, about the flag he had made. A green flag, he had it stitched himself out of an old cloth. And he’d fashioned a kind of a strap to carry it on his back with. He’d tried it swimming and you wouldn’t hardly notice it in the way. Had Doyler forgot? The flag was for the patriots Gidley and MacKinley. To claim the Muglins for Ireland.
Doyler was huffing away. “What’s funny?” asked Jim.
“I know a pole too we can hang it from.”
Jim felt a tug on him below and his breath came murmuring out. He had to take another breath the further to let it murmur.
Doyler creaked round to face him. “It’s a tiny bed,” he said.
“I can make more room.”
“No, it’s a tiny bed not to be friendly in it.” He pulled Jim closer and pressed against him. “Sure you don’t mind?”
“It’s lovely, Doyler.”
“I wouldn’t want you having any doubts.”
It streamed out of Jim then. Oh sure he knew that, he had no doubt about that,