THE ENDS OF ROSSFORD
THE CONCLUDING ROSSFORD
NOVEL
To Fenn, to Bren, to Todd and Layla, to the Houghtons, the Lawdens, the Affrens, and Dylan…
To the porn stars, the priests, the prophets, the prayers, the houses, the lovers and the families of the city of Rossford, Indiana. Without the friendship of Rossford, I would not know friendship or love or grace outside of it, and that is the truth.
For half a decade I gave you everything because you gave me everything first.
PART ONE
TOM AND FENN
ONE
TOM
“It is much too hot much too early this year,” Fenn Houghton declared. “We must lodge a complaint about this shit.”
“What we must do is com’on,” Adele told her brother.
She looked around his dorm room and said, “How do you live in a place so small?”
“It’s not the room that’s so small,” Fenn argued. “It’s your ass that’s so big, and it usually isn’t here.”
As Adele Houghton watched her little brother standing before the mirror, cock his fedora over his right eye, wink at himself and grabbed his cigarettes, she noted, “There’s something terrible about you.”
“Just one thing?” he asked as they left his dorm room for the dim third floor hallway and they headed down the stairs.
“You didn’t even lock your door.”
“The only time I lock my door is when I’m in my room, and that’s because I’m either naked, drunk or both.”
Adele ignored this as they went down the creaking steps of Saint James Hall. It was in the oldest part of Loretto College, and across from it was the red brick Music Hall.
“Autumn gets hotter and hotter,” Adele said.
“I guess global warming is real after all.”
“Last year,” Adele remembered, “it was like this until October. Leaves red and gold, the weather in the eighties. It felt like the world was on fire.”
“And yet we’re still here.”
Then Fenn said: “Is Nell coming?”
“Nell went on a romantic trip with Kevin.”
“Um,” Fenn said.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I don’t like him. But you knew that.”
“Well,” Adele shrugged. “It’s not our decision.”
“But your husband was your decision,” Fenn wanted to say. He didn’t though. As they approached the field and heard the noise of the college, Fenn thought what a bad choice Hoot Lawden was for a husband. What the hell had she seen in him? What was in women that made them pick men like that? Actually he wasn’t bad. He just wasn’t much of anything.
“We need to get a good seat.” Adele said.
Loretto couldn’t afford—and the student body’s interest never would have supported—both a football field and a track so one field doubled as both. As Adele and Fenn clambered up, Maisy Baird, wide faced and red haired, waved to them. She was sitting with her new husband—Mr. Baird—and Adele and Fenn now sat beside her, Fenn murmuring, “Excuse me,” to Jaime Roberto and Paul Fossano.
“Sure, just trip right over me,” Paul jested.
“It’s good to see you,” Maisy embraced Adele.
“You’ll be seeing a lot more of her,” Fenn poked his head around his sister.
“What’s that?” Maisy said.
“I’m moving back here.”
“Right on,” Maisy said. “Only Russell wants to move.”
“Seriously? Where?”
“Down to Indy.”
Maisy shrugged. “Not too far. Still… not too close either.”
“Shhhh!” Fenn whispered.
On the track the girls were taking their positions. Jill Tomlin and Christine Rester were the only white ones. Jill was well muscled, a basketball player the rest of the year. Christine was track all the time, birdlike, bird faced. Beside her, golden brown colored, half Hawaiian, long black hair tied up in a bun was Tara Veems.
The pistol fired, the announcer barked, “And they’re off!”
Maisy stood up and screamed while Adele clapped her hands fervently, shouting, “Do it, girl!”
Fenn watched. He could never shout or even breathe when Tara ran. She was dangerously fast, and when not competing she ran with her hair streaming in the breeze. She was, honestly, the only woman Fenn could have loved.
Adele and Maisy could cheer and talk at the same time. As they watched their friend bend around the half mark of the first circle, Maisy said, “Did you hear Bill’s getting married?”
“Bill Bill? Billy Bill?”
“Say his name however many ways you want to,” Maisy said, “and the answer is: yes.”
“To who?”
“Some bitch he met in New York, and I mean she is a bitch. Mark my words. Her family’s all Waspy and shit. They had money, but they act like they still have it. We never did, but Bill’s about to make it so he’s a perfect fit. They’re going to make him feel like a hillbilly, though.”
“Yeah, but if she marries Bill her last name will still be Affren.”
“Yeah,” Maisy said. “But people like that, they’re never really Affrens. Like that bag, Tina! God, I hate her. She’s pregnant, though. I mean, that horrible slut is fit to burst and she swears she’ll never have another one.”
“I’m going to have lots of kids,” Adele prophesied.
Fenn snorted.
Fenn turned from the race long enough to say: “So how many grandchildren do your parents have now?”
Maisy Baird shrugged: “Just Ryan’s one, and Jack has a kid. I know I’m in no hurry.”
Fenn turned back to the race. Tara was approaching the last lap, ahead of them all—or he thought she was, it was hard to tell. His eyes followed his friend to the end.
“And it’s Veems first, Tomlin second! And Shenika Beckworth in third place.”
All around him, Fenn saw people cheering, felt the seats moving with foot stomping. But sound came late to him. He clapped slowly. He was never going to be a clapping person.
“That was something,” Adele noted. “I’m tired just watching.”
“We gotta get down and circle her,” Maisy began to cut her way through the stands shouting, “Scuse me! Pardon me. Eh, Veneziano, get your bony ass out of the way!
“Tara!” Maisy hooted. “Tara!”
Tara turned from the circle of girls hugging her and shouted up: “Maisy Affren, get down here, you dyke!”
“Damn, bitch, it takes one to know one.”
Adele and Fenn came with her, and Fenn declared, “Tonight we party.”
“Oh, hell yes,” Tara wrapped an arm around her friend, “Tonight we do party, and don’t you dare say some shit about going to sleep or having a headache. I’m dragging your ass out for fun.”
They did the circuit. Two years ago, when Maisy Baird had still been Maisy Affren, she and Tina and Tara did the circuit with them. On a Saturday night, at around nine-thirty, or maybe ten, after one had proper rest, dinner and the day before, and was ready to get up again and party, there would be a knock at Fenn’s door, and it would be Tara, and Maisy would be with her, or maybe he and Tara would go over to Maisy’s dorm, which was in Justin Hall, and they would have a beer, or two beers, crack a window and smoke cigarettes, blowing the grey smoke out of the window while looking out over campus and planning their strategy.
Then they would go to all the rooms where a little noise was heard, where, on this dry campus, there might be a party. You’d see people you generally didn’t get to see during the week, talk about life, head on out, move to the next room where another little party was happening. The girls were fun and rowdy, and they would move from Justin to Saint Helen Hall, but not Saint Mary’s because the cheerleaders lived there and they were bitches, hoes and penny sluts who made it with all the football players and then claimed to be virgins because they only got fucked in the ass.
From there they moved to Gallagher where all the potheads—okay, half of the potheads—lived. Security had given up on patrolling the second floor, and it was a cross between a Bob Marley concert and a Grateful Dead tour. In fact, Bob and Jerry could be seen all over the place, or people attempting to look like them. There were long tall white boys with blond dreadlocks, pot and beer, acid for the taking, though Tara and Fenn and Maisy never took it.
They cut clear of Anderson Hall because it was the football dorm and stories abounded of girls being raped there. One night, passing it with Trisha Harper, she had tapped Fenn on the shoulder and said, “Is that what I think it is?”
He looked up.
“I don’t know what you think it is,” Fenn told her, “but if you think it’s a chick’s bare ass pressed against a window as she’s getting fucked, then yes, that’s what it is.”
They avoided Bishop Koll Hall because it was the baseball dorm, and the baseball players came from the surrounding farm towns where they still referred to black people as “colored” and half of their fathers were involved in the Klan. There was a tree outside of Koll where several sneakers hung, and Fenn always wondered if that was because they couldn’t find any Negroes. Tara had said, “Well, let’s not help them on that score.”
Michael Bueno, head of the philosophy club, had a girlfriend—Janette—and she said that her little sister had dated Jeff Calderone, a baseball player, and he’d had sex with her then recorded it and showed the tape to all of his friends. That was a rite of passage in Koll Hall and another reason to avoid it. Yes, Koll was also a good place for a white girl to get raped, but the white girls who got raped by football players wanted to be cheerleaders and get enhanced boobs, and the ones who got raped in Koll wanted to go to Bible Study and vote Republican.
“They should all be dykes,” was Tara’s studied decision.
There was also Williamson Hall, which was where most of the basketball players lived. That was safe, but violence had been done to it. Cara Standard, high as a kite and wishing to revenge herself on her ex boyfriend, a center, had climbed into her truck one night and driven a car into his room. The wall was strong. Cara’s car was not. After she’d gotten out of the hospital there was jail time and rehab.
Then there had been Bess Bamber. After breaking up with Jeffrey Rodriguez, she declared herself a bisexual. This was no big deal. What was a big deal is that one evening she had gone to Williamson Hall, telling many of the basketball players that she could “Come in buckets.”
“We don’t believe you,” they said.
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
And so they had followed her into the second floor lounge, a tatty, threadbare place, and sitting down she said, “Close the door so we can have some privacy.”
Then, in a chair under one of the lounge windows, she took down her pants, then her panties, and preceded to masturbate and prove that, indeed, she could come in buckets, all in that chair. The basketball players were amazed. When she had finished, Bess said, “Now, you have to promise not to tell anyone. This is just between us.”
The next day, Bess arrived at Tara’s door, red faced and scandalized.
“It’s so hard to be a sexual person on this campus,” she lamented. “You can’t trust anyone to keep a secret. Can you believe they told?”
“Naw, girl,” Tara said as Bess put her head on Tara’s shoulder and Tara rolled her eyes toward Fenn. “Some people just have no class.”
But tonight they weren’t going to any of these halls. They cut a line for Saint Basil because that was where most of the track girls had boyfriends. Fenn liked Basil Hall best because there was always some shy quiet boy there who reminded Fenn of Dan and made him think it was time to have a boyfriend again. It was a quiet place where you could get a drink—or several. Half the boys were on the soccer team.
“Look at you!” Fenn greeted his friend.
Tara was in black trousers with suspenders over a white shirt. Like Fenn, she wore a fedora.
“I look good, don’t I?” she demanded, tipping her black hat over one eye. “All dressed up and no one to fuck.”
“Not on this campus.”
Tara looked around. “Definitely not on this campus.”
“Oh my God!” Jaime Roberto screamed. “Tara, you were so good! God, wasn’t she good?” She grasped Fenn’s wrist.
“She always is,” Fenn said.
“I mean, I saw your first mete. Hell, I covered it, and I was like, this girl is going to go far this year. And here you are. I mean, you even had Jill beat. This is your year.”
“Jill’s good,” Tara said.
“Jill is good. Jill is the best and you better say it loud because her boyfriend is here, but this year you can be the best too. Right Fenn? Fenn?”
Tara turned to her friend.
“What are you looking at?” she demanded.
“I’m not looking at anything.”
Tara followed his glance and said, “You’re looking at that boy.”
“Which boy?” Jaime said. Then: “Oh, Fenn, you have to be careful. If he comes from California or New York he might have that AIDS.” She cupped a hand to his ear and whispered: “They even have it in Indiana now.”
Fenn was half irritated, but the other half of him wanted to laugh.
“You can’t get AIDS by looking. Anyway, he’s gone now.”
“Don’t worry,” Tara told her friend. “I’ll remember him,”
“I’ve never seen him before,” Fenn said. “He could have just been visiting.” He sighed, but he was surprised that it hurt a little. He was suddenly very aware there hadn’t been someone in his life since Dan, and now Dan was definitely, certainly bound for the priesthood.
Tara said, very precisely, “He was little. He had lots and lots of dark hair. He needed a shave. He had soccer shorts and looked really shy, like you like ‘em.”
“Oh. Those kinds won’t give you AIDS,” Jaime said, relieved.
And then she said, “I think I know who you mean. Did he have blue shorts on, and a Chicago Cubs cap?”
“Yes!” Fenn said.
“I didn’t know if he was gay or not. He’s really quiet. I don’t think he’s into girls. He’s really shy. He’s sweet.”
“But does he have a name?” Tara asked, becoming impatient for Fenn’s sake.
“Oh, yeah,” Jaime said. “That’s Tom Mesda.”
