Brief History of Male Nudes in America

Ground Rules

ewis Houser and his thirteenyear -old son Nathan were hiding behind a toolshed in the unlucky state of Missouri. They had been like that for over an hour—waiting —ready to salvage their lives and take what was theirs. "Ground rule number one," Lewis had told Nathan earlier, "is no talking, not even a single word because this hot, windless air can take a sound and stretch it and make it last forever." Nathan was small for his age, but he understood perfectly what they were doing, and as he stood there with his father behind the shed he was determined that the sun could bake him and that he could stand forever and a day on a boy's shaky legs, but he would not say a word. From their secret vantage point, Lewis and Nathan watched the back of the house, specifically the screen door, which had banged open and shut twice since they began their wait. Both times it was Alta who came out of the house, first to empty a white sack into a garbage can and then to hang laundry on the clothesline. Lewis noticed Ground Rules L. 1 A Brief History of Male Nudes in America that she was thinner than before, tanned and rather slow, no longer his Snow Queen, no longer the rouged Queen Beehe had married in a six-minute ceremony in Ely, Nevada. "She's no one that we even know anymore"—that was ground rule number two, and three weeks ago Lewis had bought Nathan a lime snow cone to explain it. "She was your mother once," he told Nathan in a snack shop called Pacific Ice, "but now she's another woman. She made her choices, and they didn't include us. Thirteen is old enough to swallow your teeth and accept that." And, in fact, Nathan had felt nothing when Alta came out of the house. In the past three years that she had been living another life, Nathan had practiced feeling nothing, had steadily pressed the lead of a pencil into his hand every day of school until his father had seen it, opened the bottle of Merthiolate, and said, "Boys who like to hurt themselves wind up downriver." When Nathan looked at Alta there in her yard after so much practice , she was just someone reaching up to hang a wet shirt on a line. She was only a tired looking, dark-haired obstacle who separated them from what they had driven eight hundred miles in an oil-guzzling Chrysler to retrieve. They knew that Todd was inside the house, and they knew that they were in limbo until they had him back—the three of them in the Chrysler heading into a star-topped, million-dollar world where Lewis said their bread would always come buttered hot. The windows in the house were open, and soon after they arrived at their point of surveillance Lewis and Nathan had heard the TVfrom inside, something that sounded like cartoons—a duck talking, a woodpecker going crazy on a tree. Lewis had turned to Nathan and pointed at his own ear, and Nathan shook his head yes in response, signaling that he'd heard it, too. Standing silent as grass, their cotton shirts sweated through, they waited in their place and became familiar with ground rule number three—invisibility. At first Nathan could not imagine being a ghost, 2 Ground Rules but that's how his father had described it. "No one can see us. Everything has to be done in the blink of a blue eye." They had bulldozed the brown getaway Chrysler into a hearty stand of sumac just down the road so that the car became invisible as well, vinyl top and rust spots lost to the dense Midwestern cover. Now they stood at the very edge of the toolshed in a hairline margin of safety where they could watch the house but still remain unseen. "One careless move, a sneeze or even a cough could ruin everything," Lewis had warned Nathan, but Nathan had sworn he could do it, he could be a ghost, he could swallow a sneeze, he could bite a Grouping cough back for hours. "Know what a felony is?" Lewis had asked Nathan while changing the plugs on the Chrysler weeks ago. Nathan thought his father had said melody, so he answered yes. Lewis nodded and bent...