The Greenbelt
Coggin Galbreath
This will be a job for tweezers and a long time. The boys wore gloves to handle the paddles but not the fruit, and now, as they peel the prickly pears on Avery’s back porch, their fingers are furry with tiny, invisible thorns. Seb, who has done this every summer since he was old enough to hold a knife, slips the pears gently and efficiently from their skins. Avery, sweaty and stained fuchsia to the elbows, picks up a spiky little balloon—“Fuck!”—and drops it. He squeezes his finger so a bead of blood wells up.
“That was a big one.”
“The little ones are worse,” Seb says. “They’re impossible to get out.”
“Now you tell me?” Avery says, his finger in his mouth. He can tell Seb is trying not to smile as he removes a peel in a spiral, a single strip. Since Avery came home for the summer, every day has been consumed by some part of Seb. Today it’s his hands: the little white crescents under his short fingernails; the pale Nike swoosh scar from a piece of barbed wire; the dark, earthy pink of the juice on his skin. By the time they have picked out all the thorns, tenderly, hair by hair with a pair of Madge’s tweezers, he’ll know Seb’s hands better than his own.
This heap of prickly pears, half of them peeled now and shining wetly in the hottest sun Austin has had all summer, came from the greenbelt on the other side of the garden. It’s tiny from one side to the other, but deep, a miniature canyon, a jagged scrap of land so completely unusable that a few of the area’s oldest residents still call it home: cicadas, armadillos, rattlesnakes, a coyote Avery sees sometimes from his window at dawn. Seb has seen the coyote too, on his morning runs, and wondered if she resents all these humans who crowded out her family, who are now being crowded out by wealthier humans, who will eventually be crowded out by corporations and move to wherever the other people went, wherever there used to be coyotes.
Seb’s house—faded salmon paint, screen door, ancient pecan tree—is right across the greenbelt from this tasteful, glass-and-concrete cube. During the construction, his mother, Maria, sat out on the back porch every morning, listening. “You hear that, mijo?” she said. “Get used to it.” At the time, Seb never dreamed he would end up living in the new house for over a month after his mother kicked him out—but all that aside, he knows she is right. More white people will move to the neighborhood until it’s just as expensive as downtown, until eventually their house will be demolished to make space for something more like Avery’s house, the pecan tree will be cut down to make space for a garage, and Maria Perez will no longer live on the street where she grew up, where her family has lived for five generations. Maybe, Seb thinks, they could take a leaf from the coyote’s book and live somewhere so rocky and inconvenient that people like Avery’s moms wouldn’t want it. In fact, however, Avery’s moms do want the greenbelt; partly because they enjoy feeling like they live in the country, partly because they care about coyotes, and partly because they think the Perez’s backyard is a bit of an eyesore, they are lobbying to get the greenbelt protected by the city.
The sun has moved, and now the boys’ knees are sticking out from the shadow of the porch. Seb almost says something to Avery, who burns easily, and is too focused on avoiding the thorns to notice. If they sit out here much longer his legs will be as pink as his fingers—but Seb thinks of the freckles that will follow, and selfishly decides to let Avery burn. He loves those freckles. He has favorites: an oblong one under Avery’s eye, a pair of them on Avery’s shoulder, a perfectly round one next to Avery’s nipple which sometimes sports a single hair. He’s not sure how he ended up on the porch of this house that looks like it belongs in a magazine, taking inventory of this white boy’s freckles, only a few months after he jogged past one morning, saw a freckly white boy doing yoga on the porch, and wondered where he came from, since this house belonged to the lesbians and lesbians didn’t have kids. At the time, by some Olympic feat of mental gymnastics, Seb made no connection between the appearance of the boy and the fact that his morning runs now made him so horny he masturbated in the shower as soon as he got back.
“Madge would love this.” Avery carefully cuts away a section of rot from an otherwise juicy pear. “She loves any niche Texan food. You know, ’cause she has such a complex about being from Ohio.” Madge’s affected cowboy aesthetic was one of the first things Seb noticed about his new neighbors. He took Carol, in her faded denim and linen, for Madge’s landscaper.
“She still isn’t speaking to you?” says Seb, even though he knows the answer. His own mother isn’t speaking to him either, but that isn’t surprising. Avery and his family represent most of what she fears and resents in the world. Even Seb catches himself thinking that maybe these people have corrupted him—how else could he change so much so quickly?—but it never occurred to him that he could be a bad influence on Avery until Madge told him so as she slammed her front door in his face.
“She’ll come around,” Avery says. “It’s complicated. Her parents are like, super Catholic. They sent her to conversion therapy and stuff.”
Carol has been reminding Avery of this lately as part of a thankless effort to reconcile her wife and her son. Avery sympathizes, but it doesn’t change the fact that Madge threw him out of the house when she learned he had been attending Mass with Seb all summer. “We took him in for a month, and this is how you thank us? Why do you think that woman kicked him out in the first place, Avery Jordan-Ward? Because she’s Catholic!” He is back in the house now, because Carol has convinced Madge she stands a better chance of getting through to him that way. Still, she hasn’t spoken to him since she found the rosary in his sock drawer.
“What about Maria?” Avery asks, leaving the real question—whether she will let Seb go back to college next month—implicit. Seb is the first in his family to go to college, and his mother has worked hard to make this happen. Now that he is “throwing his life away,” she doesn’t know what to do except make him go to church—though she’s backed off ever since he went cheerfully to Mass with red fingernails. Seb can’t help noticing that she’s completely focused on getting through the summer, like she has no doubt the whole thing will pass like a bad dream when Avery goes back to Chicago. Of her many convictions, this is the one that scares him the most: that people like Avery Jordan-Ward don’t wait around for people like Sebastian Garcia Perez.
“The same,” says Seb. “We’re both praying for the other to change their mind.”
“I bet the Holy Mother’ll take your side,” says Avery. “She conceived a child with a genderless spirit. If that isn’t queer I don’t know what is.”
Seb throws a peeled prickly pear at him, exasperated and deeply in love. “And you wonder why my mom hates you.”
“Just sayin’. Mary’s been giving the patriarchy the finger for, like, two thousand years. She’ll totally intercede on your behalf.”
They sit back and survey the bluebonnet colander piled high with bulbous, glistening lumps of red fruit and the glass bowl full of strips of spiky rind. Avery leans against the post of the porch with his legs spread, and Seb, between them, leans against Avery. The first time they kissed, the first time Seb kissed a boy, was ten weeks ago in this exact spot. After weeks of noticing each other—the boy on the porch with his butt lifted up in downward dog, the boy jogging by in a tank top dark with sweat—they found themselves sitting across the table from each other in Avery’s dining room, a dining room Avery was still learning to think of as “his,” even though it had all the same furniture, even the same blown glass light fixtures, as the old house in Barton Hills. The Perez’s were the first in a series of getting-to-know-the-neighbors dinners, which Madge and Carol embarked on with great sincerity, if not sensitivity. As Maria introduced herself in a thick accent, Avery wondered firstly whether the Mexican tile in the kitchen counted as appropriation, and secondly whether tostadas were such a good idea after all.
If Seb seemed a little uncomfortable, it was partly because, in spite of his best efforts and most fevered prayers, he could not stop himself from undressing Avery in his mind, and partly because he was watching as it dawned on his mother (already visibly distressed to hear Avery calling his parents by their first names) that her new neighbors were married. It was obvious to Seb that she wished they hadn’t come and wanted to leave; after dinner, when Carol pretended to decline her offer of help with clearing up, he saw her hesitate before insisting. While Madge washed and Maria dried, Carol sent the boys outside with a bucket of avocado peels, onion skins, and cilantro stalks. They passed between the dark rows of Carol’s tomatoes, beans, and sunflowers to the compost heap at the edge of the greenbelt, still a pile of egg shells and farmers market vegetable scraps in the newly established garden. At this hour, the trees were full of screaming cicadas and lazy fireflies that came out as they watched: one, then two, then a hundred at once, like the stars.
“A coyote lives in there,” Seb said. “I used to leave food out for her in the spring, when she had babies, but my mom didn’t want her coming close to the house.”
Avery stood next to Seb and a little behind him, looking over his shoulder into the darkness between the trees. It was a hot night, and the smell of Avery’s sweat triggered something in Seb’s body that made him feel like he was two miles into a run, weightless, hyper-focused, euphoric.
“I’ve seen her. Twice, early in the morning. I call her Wiley, like the cartoon.”
“You mean El Correcaminos?”
Avery was kicking himself. He’d been so sure he was getting signals during dinner, but he’d obviously been wrong. Seb stood with his hands in his pockets, staring into the trees, oblivious to their closeness. “Sure,” he said. High school Spanish had not taught him the word for roadrunner. “Looney Tunes? Incredibly violent?”
“Saturday mornings at ten. My favorite.”
They stood for a minute or two, watching the fireflies, neither of them sure what they were waiting for, until Avery led the way back to the house. On the porch, Seb stopped. He didn’t think he could go back inside, put away dishes, go home, and go to bed without his life being different than it had been before. When Avery kissed him it was like opening, like a sunflower leaning into the heat, like a firefly turning on, surprising and right. His mouth was as hot, as wet, as red, as tart as a prickly pear. Seb would repent of this kiss, would even confess it, but it wouldn’t keep him from wanting to do it again, and every time he would remember a little less clearly why he had been sorry for it in the first place.
When they get too hot, they take the fruit into the kitchen and put a huge pot on the stove. Avery pours in cane sugar and they watch it turn pink. While the fruit cooks, they sit on the kitchen floor with iced tea and tweezers, laughing, singing a little, mostly not saying much, but each taking the other’s hand and picking out thorns all afternoon. Avery decides he will try to talk to Madge tonight. He knows that when she gave him a nice, gender-neutral name to go with a green nursery and told him he could be whoever he wanted to be, this wasn’t what she had in mind. But he’ll try to make her understand that no one is more surprised by his spiritual awakening than he is, and that God, whoever they are, isn’t something he chose, but a space he has discovered in himself, as true and tangible as sex, the taste of tomatoes, the sun on his skin. Seb promises the jam will be a jar of pure Texas in a cold Chicago winter, that it will taste like kissing, and Avery promises to ration it until he returns.
Coggin Galbreath is Texas-born writer currently based in Scotland. His short fiction has received awards from the San Antonio and Texas Book Festivals. He studies English and Comparative Literature at the University of St. Andrews.