Something Akin to a Sweet but Stern Mahogany Gaze
by Tyler Lemley
University of the Incarnate Word
Tyler Lemley is a senior at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, TX, and is double majoring in Theatre Arts and English. He has previously been published in the Quirk literary journal and has work forthcoming in The Main Street Rag.
The smell of hay bales takes me back to an old ranch house one of my family friends lived in. I was friends with his son and stepdaughter. I was somewhere North of 8 and South of 10 years old. I was, of course, very infatuated with the boy. He was a typical cowboy’s son. He drove us around on the gator, taught me how to jump from hay bale to hay bale, and showed me how to tie a lasso (which I promptly forgot). We played video games, had nerf wars, and explored the small ranch, which seemed the size of a city when I was little.
I remember the first time I met him. The girl and I were playing on the trampoline. (I had a lasso tied around me and was pretending to be a bucking bronco.) He hopped out of his daddy’s 4x4 and joined his stepsister in taming the wild horse. This meeting led to putting out firework fires and pretending to be firefighters on the Fourth of July, shaking up beer when we were forced to fetch a cold one from the cooler, staying over at his house and then asking him to turn a nightlight on for me. He was three years older than me, and I suppose he had outgrown his fear of the dark. He obliged, turning on the crack and fizz of the television (salt and pepper, he called it). I suppose, at one time, he thought of me as a little brother. I suppose I thought of him as the most enthralling boy I had ever met.
He and his daddy’s ranch exist in my mind outside of any timeline. It floats in the cerebrum amongst old commercial jingles and early 2000’s dad rock songs. It often seemed he and that ranch existed outside of time and space completely, so I have no reference point for its place in my memory. When we would drive down the dirt road and through the miles of trees, we would enter some state of otherworldliness until we shot out the other side, into his clearing.
I can’t confidently say I had a crush on him at that ranch—I was too young for such trivial matters—but I was certainly allured. Eventually, his family moved, and we stopped hanging out as much. A move back then, even just to the next town over, really might as well have been across the ocean.
I remember the last time I saw him, several years after the ranch. I was fully a teenager by then, fully hormonal, fully in the thralls of my attraction to boys. My dad and I had gone to see his dad’s new place. Everyone was in the field out back, throwing cans of beer into the grass, lobbing up skeets, and tossing shotgun shots up into the air (loosely aimed at the plastic discs). They asked if I wanted to shoot. I didn’t. He came walking up from the house.
I could barely look him in the eyes. He had grown older, taller, and more into his frame. He smelled of dry grass and oak and something akin to a sweet but stern mahogany glaze. His eyes hadn’t changed, though. Still a blue that grabbed sunlight like a reflecting pool. A blue that makes you question if you’d ever really seen blue before seeing them. An arresting blue.
I can confidently say that I had a crush on him then. However, years at that age are like decades, so we really didn’t know each other anymore.
A couple years ago, my dad told me he had seen him in a gas station, and they stopped to chat. He had asked about me and told my dad he remembered how much fun we used to have as kids. I could picture it: him standing there in Wranglers and a Hooey hat, tall boy in hand, face aged by his father’s death, recounting the ranch: tire swings, old sheds, and late nights. Despite the ware of time on his face, I can imagine his eyes still piercing and dominant, dripping in a blue that, like the ranch, exists in that place beyond memory, beyond the corporeal, beyond anything I’ve experienced since.