Grown Men Don’t Cry

Fiction by Mike Keller-Wilson

“Quit crying, Ethan. It’ll only hurt for a second.” My father set the nails aside and tightened the leather strap holding my head against his workbench. “Now, hold still.” He pinched the first silver nail between thumb and forefinger, lowered the shining point to the corner of my eye, and rested his fingers against the bridge of my nose. He raised the hammer. I clenched my eyes against the tears, yanked my neck taut and prayed for stillness.

“Son, look at me.”

The hammer hovered, his hand firm around the wooden haft, but he was tapping its clawed back against one of his own nails, worn silver dots cornering each eye, framing his nose.

“See? Nothing to cry over.” He tapped the nail head again and a smile scratched its way across his face.

He brought the hammer down. A swift arc of precise force terminating with a flesh-muffled ring that would echo through my head for days.

I stopped crying.

He shook another nail from the torn mouth of its sterile bag. I blinked at the cold seeping into my face — was it a reaction to the nail’s numbing agent or the untroubled lines of my father’s face? He tore free a shop towel, wiped the blood drop streaking my cheek. He repeated the process with my left eye, released the forehead strap, sat me up, and pinched me to him with a one-armed hug.

* * *

Doctors call it pubescent prefrontal stimulation, but everyone else says “getting nailed.” Most boys get nailed around their thirteenth birthday, maybe a little sooner if their parents think they’re ready. Most military academies make it an entrance requirement, the all-boys ones anyway. It is supposed to spur brain development, increase emotional maturation, and stimulate growth in the frontal lobe somehow. The science doesn’t really change things. It’s just another reason to keep doing what people have always done. People say the nails jam your tear ducts, but that’s not exactly true. It’s a chemical reaction. A compound in the nails permanently disrupts the lacrimal gland, on the other side of the eye, preventing “emotional tears,” but not basal or reflexive ones. You can blink away debris, but you won’t be sobbing at the end of Romeo and Juliet.

With a few exceptions, girls get their ears pierced and boys get nailed. Girls mature faster, right? They don’t need any help.

Most hardware stores take appointments. A few old-school pharmacies and barbershops still have the right equipment. Some people do it at home. Keep it traditional.

* * *

“Bro! Did it hurt?”

The boys circled around before first period. I’d already told Robbie everything on the bus, so he was answering the questions. He knew I didn’t want the attention. I knew he’d love the chance.

“Hurt? No way. My man Ethan’s a champ.” Robbie said, jabbing an elbow into my arm, all show and no real force behind it, making me smile. “See? Look at him. Nobody better mess with him now.”

“You ever hear about the kid from Westbrook Middle? He went blind in both eyes after his nailing,” said one of the other boys. “They say his dad was drunk.”

We went silent then, thinking about our own eyes, our own dads.

On the way to Pre-Calc, just Robbie and me, I bumped my shoulder into his. “Thanks.”

Robbie just smiled. I watched the fleshy corners of his eyes crinkle into sharp points and disappear.

* * *

When I got home from soccer, Mom was drizzling oil into a pan while Dad hacked at something on his cutting board. I hadn’t even dropped my backpack before she sped over and hugged me close, the bottle of oil still in hand.

“Mom,” I muttered into her shoulder. She released me and stepped back, looked me full in the face.

“I’ll never get used to it. My sweet Ethan, all grown up. Nailed at twelve and a half.” She looked over her shoulder at Dad as he swept his onion pile into the hot pan with the knife’s edge. “Couldn’t we have waited until he was thirteen, at least?”

“It was time,” said Dad. He set the cutting board down and looked at me, expectant.

The onions hissed and soured the air. “I was ready, Mom.”

* * *

Robbie’s basement was musty and there was nowhere to sit. We brought in two fraying lawn chairs from the garage to set in front of the TV I’d smuggled out of my bedroom. I told Mom it broke. I wasn’t being careful. It was my fault. I was sorry. That kept her from wondering why the flow of video game noises and boyish laughter had suddenly dried up. Maybe it would even keep her from wondering why Robbie wasn’t coming around anymore. Dad, of course, didn’t wonder.

We were alone and felt it, the weight of an empty house pressing down on the basement. Robbie’s mom had a waitressing shift at Mel’s on Tuesday and Thursday nights. She’d picked up the gig last year after Robbie’s dad split, piling his dress shirts, golf clubs, and basement furniture into a U-Haul. Robbie always said his mom was happier now, with just him and the house.

“You want to watch a movie?” Robbie asked, pushing up out of his lawn chair to shuffle through the stack of dusty DVDs I’d brought over when I took the TV. Robbie didn’t have Internet at his house anymore.

“I’ve got to be home in an hour,” I said. “Soccer practice ends at 5:30.”

“Here!” Robbie held up WALL-E. “Remember this one?”

He and I had watched it three times the weekend I first got it.

“C’mon, it’s short. We don’t even have to finish it today. We can watch the rest later.”

“As long as I don’t get busted for skipping practice,” I said.

Robbie waved away my worry before cracking open the case and putting in the disc. “You want a blanket? It gets cold down here.”

I thought of the down comforter on my futon, the one Robbie used when he slept over. I thought of the dark blue curtains over my windows, turning afternoon sun into movie-theater darkness for Call of Duty marathons.

“I’m good,” I said.

Robbie shrugged, grabbed the remote from the ground, and pushed his lawn chair next to mine, arm to arm like real movie seats.

Half an hour in, Robbie slid his pinkie against mine, grazed my hand where I clung to the textured plastic armrest. His sweaty fingertips skidded over the back of my hand and I swear I felt his pulse.

I stared at the screen, neck winched tight. He traced slow curves onto the back of my hand. Was he following the veins? Writing a note I couldn’t read?

He stopped. Did my hand arch up? Did I squeeze the armrest tighter? I stared ahead and watched the movie. One robot is desperate, clanking. The other powers down. Robbie crossed his other arm over me, palmed my cheek and turned my face toward his.

“Robbie…” my voice sank into the beige carpet, still cratered with leg-marks from missing furniture.

Robbie rubbed his thumb over the crest of my nose, raised it to my cheek, the corner of my eye. His thumbnail caught the raised nail head, the surrounding skin still red and raw.

I pulled back, didn’t quite hiss.

“It really didn’t hurt?” he asked.

“I should go,” I said, slipping my hand from under his.

* * *

Dad cranked down the footrest of his La-Z-Boy and sat up. “Ethan!”

I stopped in the doorway, gripped my hands together to keep from fidgeting.

“How was soccer practice?” His face was blank, hard lines hiding harmless curiosity. Or disappointment?

Were the nails what made his expression so hard to read? Had my face taken on some iron, too? “Good. Coach let us scrimmage for the last half hour.”

Dad sighed. “Your coach called to see if you were okay since you never showed up.”

Fuck. I closed my eyes, waited for the familiar pressure to build, for the heat to race up my neck and the snot to flood my nose, the embarrassed sniffling, the stinging release as I let the tears go. I waited for Dad to turn away.

The surprise must have been clear on my face when I opened my dry eyes. Dad smiled. Not a happy smile, a blank flash of teeth. “It takes some getting used to,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” I lowered my face, unable to take his dry-eyed stare.

“Why weren’t you at practice?”

“I got a detention…in math,” I said, imagining the iron in my blood, willing it into my voice. “I pushed a kid.” I looked up to see something break loose from the sharp angles of his face. Surprise? Relief? Guilt?

“Oh.” He cleared his throat, but I interrupted him.

“I should’ve texted you, I know.” I twisted my hands, let real guilt shine through the lie. “I didn’t want you to think my nailing was a mistake. I was ready.”

In the empty space where my voice had been, he stepped forward and gripped my shoulder with a hard hand, a hand that’d worked up from apprentice to contractor. His eyes were steady on mine. “My dad — well, I’ve tried to be better. I’m proud of you.”

I dropped both hands to my sides when he released my shoulder. I’d never heard him say anything like this. I didn’t really know anything about his dad except that he’d died while Dad was in his senior year of high school, a car wreck, the reason Dad never drank.

“Now,” he said, “give me your phone. One week. And you’re staying late at practice tomorrow to help Coach Stevens clean up.”

The surprise boiled off me in a second. “Are you — ”

“Phone.” He put out a palm, waited.

I dug into my bag, gripped the phone and squeezed the power button as I pulled it out. I had a text from Robbie. I saw the notification before the screen went dark over my secrets. I slapped the phone into his hand and stomped off until I could slam my door. I snatched the LEGO Millennium Falcon off my dresser and hurled it at the side of my mattress, even in my anger, not quite willing to damage a wall and risk more punishment. The LEGO ship bounced off the mattress, spraying pieces, then cracked and split against the arm of the futon.

I instantly regretted breaking it. Robbie and I had worked on it for hours last summer. He’d open it up and move all the mini-figs around every time he came over. When he used to come over.

I didn’t pick up the pieces. I didn’t even bother climbing into bed, just flipped off the lights and lay down in Robbie’s spot on the futon. I fell asleep with little plastic blocks jabbing into my side.

* * *

In the morning, I missed the bus and thought of Robbie sitting by himself while Mom told me how disappointed she was, how I needed to act my age, how hard she and Dad worked to provide for me so we could live in a nice neighborhood where I would go to a nice school where I wouldn’t get into fights and disappoint her.

“It wasn’t a fight, Mom. I pushed a kid,” I said, wishing I’d come up with something else to tell my dad.

She unlocked the door and told me to have a good day in a tone that made it clear she was giving an order.

* * *

Robbie stepped back from the boy circle, laid a hand on Jeff’s shoulder and said something into his ear before walking off.

I knew he’d be pissed. I thought of my phone, probably stowed away in the drawer of Dad’s wardrobe, nestled under old Hanes and atop a stack of Playboys I’d found in third grade when I was supposed to be cleaning my own room.

I imagined it piling up with missed messages until Dad opened the drawer, sent light flooding in. The moment of indecision while he balanced its weight on his palm. The screen lighting up, bomb-bright. The guilty press of his thumb scrolling through Robbie’s pleas, confessions. The evaporation of Dad’s guilt and the remaining crust of hard anger.

* * *

“Make sure you get this in your notes,” Ms. Bushwick snapped.

I stopped writing, leaving the message for Robbie half-done on a torn piece of graph paper. I met Ms. Bushwick’s stare until she continued, gesturing at the board and saying something about logarithmic functions. Robbie hunched over his notebook, one arm braced against his desk as he scratched his pen across the page. He knew I was watching. I could tell because he listened to Ms. Bushwick with his head half-turned, like he wanted to make sure he wouldn’t accidentally see me staring from three desks over.

When I looked back, Ms. Bushwick raised one pencil-thin brow as if to ask whether I’d started paying attention yet. She kept talking to the class and I returned to my graph paper, Robbie’s note, looking up occasionally to squint and nod at the board for Ms. Bushwick.

I folded the note in half, scooped it up and cupped it in one hand as I stood, and walked toward Robbie’s desk.

“Is now really the time to be wandering around, Ethan?” Ms. Bushwick jabbed a finger toward a graph.

“Sharpener,” I said. I held up my pencil, gave her a small salute. Before, I would’ve worried about drawing attention to myself like that. I would’ve started to feel the nervous tears welling up. Now, I stared back at Ms. Bushwick with the vague weight of a nail weighing down each eye.

“Hurry up, then,” she said, nodding her head toward the school-issued hand-crank sharpener in the corner.

I tried to drop the note onto Robbie’s desk as I passed, but it fluttered onto the floor. I stopped and picked it up, slapped it onto his notebook, and walked on without being any more obvious. During work time, Robbie twisted toward me and whispered, “No phone for a week? Harsh.”

“I was already basically grounded after my dad saw us…” I trailed off, looked around to see if anyone was obviously listening. No one looked up. “Anyway,” I said, “no movie. And don’t text me. My dad’ll probably read my messages before he gives it back.”

Robbie nodded. I went back to doodling since I didn’t have the notes. During the last minute of class, Ms. Bushwick tapped two fingers on the corner of my desk.

“Not listening, passing notes, drawing during work time. I hope those nails bring out some maturity soon, young man. Otherwise, you’re headed for some trouble.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Excuse me?”

She probably saw the same thing year after year: some kid starts acting up, getting mouthy, not doing his homework, then BOOM he walks in with a new freckle sparkling next to each eye and a few weeks later it’s all “Yes ma’am. No ma’am,” as it should be.

“I said, ‘No shit.’”

“We’ll have to talk about that language when you come in for detention after school.”

“After school? I’ve got practice.” The angry heat that burned the back of my neck went cold.

“You can make your excuses with your coach when you’re done,” she said. I turned toward Robbie, as if to argue my case, but he shrugged and turned back to his work. When the bell rang, I grabbed my books and hurried out.

* * *

“Fuck it. I’m not going.” Robbie was following me and this time, he was the one having to step around kids clustered at open lockers.

“Knowing Ms. Bushwick, she’ll call your parents and your coach.” He dodged an eighth grader kicking a binder down the hall.

“Fine,” I slapped an open locker door, “then I won’t go to practice. What’s the point if I’m gonna be grounded for life either way? I might as well enjoy my last afternoon.”

* * *

We didn’t turn on the movie, just sat in our separate lawn chairs as the low sun bled through the casement windows. I hadn’t said anything on the bus ride home. With each stop, I swayed toward the brown seat in front of us, watching the wrinkles in the brown fabric. Thinking: now is the moment when Ms. Bushwick lifts the phone from its cradle; now is when Mom’s pocket begins to buzz; now is when Coach calls again, voice wet with disappointment.

Robbie clears his throat. “Should we — Do you want to — ” His voice was thick and low and he cleared his throat again. “Talk. Should we talk, I mean?” I got the sense that he wasn’t sure how to deal with me like this, how to handle the cold flame of anger I’d carried into this dark basement. It was his concern that did it, like cupping his hand around the flicker of rage — at my dad, at Ms. Bushwick, at myself most of all — he’d snuffed it out.

“No. I’m fine.” The last of the anger disappeared into the air like smoke. The dark was filled with what-next worries and guilt. “Sorry.” I turned toward him, tried not to think further than that, further than his messy eyebrows, pinched in concern, further than the one dark curl tracing the top of his left ear. He reached over, squeezed a hand around the loose fist I didn’t know I’d been making on my armrest.

He was the one who always talked in class, before school, at backyard birthday parties and afternoons of swim lessons. What was there to say now? Even after my dad found us, even after his offer of snacks died on his lips, after he’d slammed the front door on Robbie’s heels. What was there to say? Dad had gotten the nails that night.

I opened my mouth, ready to tell him that maybe it was time for us to talk, but he squeezed my fist again and leaned forward, closed the gap between us so fast I thought we’d bump heads, but he pushed his lips into mine, mashed his bottom lip against my front teeth.

I closed my eyes and felt his hand leave my fist, disappear from the world of sensation, only to skim the side of my neck, fingertips wrapping around to settle and grip the valley where spine met skull. It was like we were in my bedroom again, both catching our breath from the freshly-ended pillow fight, a draw. Robbie disarmed, his Transformers pillow lodged behind the futon. My own pillow, Lightning McQueen, dangling where Robbie gripped my wrist with one hand. His other hand gripped my neck, just as it did now, pulled me close. Of course we didn’t hear Dad’s steps in the hall. Of course we didn’t hear the doorknob’s brassy squeak.

Creaking floorboards, a voice above. Robbie’s mom, upstairs. Robbie’s hand dropped from my neck, I pulled back and waited, listening to her phone-voice.

She kept talking. Too long. She would’ve been off the phone by now if it had been Mom. I smiled. Robbie let out a long breath that turned into a bit of a laugh.

It was when he leaned back over, still smiling, that we heard Robbie’s mom open the basement door and shout down the stairs.

“Robbie! Please come up here. Now.”

Robbie shrugged, pushed himself up from the lawn chair, and padded up the creaking stairs, disappearing piece by piece as the ceiling hid his head, shoulders, torso, until first one bright sock and then the next stepped out of view.

Without Robbie, the basement felt unfamiliar, like I’d been suddenly dropped there. Alone, I looked around and couldn’t put a name to any of the objects in the mostly barren room. I watched my own reflection in the dark screen before me and found myself wondering where I was, who I was.

Creaking on the stairs. Robbie’s return brought me back. I looked around again, naming the world: TV, beige carpet, basement.

“My mom said you’ve got to go.” Robbie was looking down, digging the toes of one foot into a crater of compressed fibers where a couch had once rested when his dad was still his dad and nothing else. “She said it was your dad on the phone.”

I stood. I went numb, bit by bit.

“Do you think he told her?” Robbie asked.

I wasn’t sure, but I shook my head and headed upstairs. When I looked back, Robbie was leaning forward in one of the chairs, running a hand through his black curls.

Upstairs, his mom clutched her phone, rested her chin on its rounded corner as she stared out the window over the sink. I walked behind her, passing through the kitchen to the back door. I balanced myself with a hand on the doorknob as I slipped into my shoes. She continued to stare out the window.

“Goodbye, Ms. McDunough.” I said. She didn’t answer, so I twisted the knob and opened the door.

“Ethan?”

I stopped with one foot on the porch, turned and let the screen door rest against the back of my calf.

She pushed back from the sink and finally turned toward me. Her jaw was set just the way it had been when my dad tried to give Robbie a BB gun for his birthday.

Until I started kindergarten, Ms. McDunough had been the one to cut my hair. Mom read somewhere that little kids develop a negative association with whoever cut their hair, so she cut Robbie’s and Ms. McDunough cut mine. I didn’t remember any trauma or bad feelings. What came back as I stood in the doorway was how Ms. McDunough would use a special brush to sweep away the loose hairs from my neck. I remembered shivering at the tickle and scratch of those bristles, the signal that I was freed from my chair, from being locked in place.

“Stay away from my son,” she hissed. Her eyes were narrow and I saw the forked line of a vein, faint and blue, follow her cheek and skirt her eye to reach the side of one brow. “Do what you want with your life, but leave Robbie out of it.” With that, she crossed the kitchen with quick steps and slammed the door.

* * *

Dad was waiting on the porch swing when I got home. Blank-faced, he just pointed a thumb inside, toward my room.

I lay on my bed, noted that my dresser drawers were all open, clothes upturned like someone had been looking through them. Eventually, I heard Mom pull into the garage, heard voices in the kitchen: Dad’s rumbling and her frantic questions getting louder and louder until she was near yelling.

At some point, I fell asleep. I woke to an echo of a sound and the feeling of silence that only comes in the middle of the night. I stretched, pressed a hand to my eye and found my nail heads no longer hurt, nothing did.

Something moved behind my dark curtains. I should’ve been shocked when Robbie’s tear-streaked face peeked through the gap. He must be clinging to the ledge, pressing his toes into some gaps in the stone exterior.

I took down the screen, set it next to my bed, unlatched the window and swung it out so Robbie could scramble in and fall onto the mattress. He lay there, panting, shoes propped on my pillow. I listened for thudding footsteps outside my door. Nothing.

“What are you doing here, Robbie?” He’d ripped a hole in one sleeve on his way in.

He squeezed shut his eyes, scrunched the sheet in his fists. Robbie took a breath and raised a hand to his face. I noticed the fingermarks, deepening red stripes across his cheek. He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Did it hurt, Ethan?”

I watched him for a moment, blank, empty, numb.

He stuck two fingers out in a “V,” pointed toward his eyes and repeated, “Did it?”

“You won’t feel anything. I promise.”

Dad’s workshop was unlocked. I sat Robbie down in the reclined chair, looped the leather strap through its guides, and tightened it until I could see a flat line of skin bulge against its edge. Robbie shivered, the shaking in his body more pronounced now that his head was restrained. He was crying, eyes crunched by the muscles in his cheeks, his forehead. A faint whistle came from his nose with each exhale. The hammer and the extra nails were stacked on the corner of the workbench, almost expectant.

I took the latex gloves from their sterile package, pulled out the first gleaming nail. Robbie’s eyes were still closed. A fresh tear was sliding down the line of his jaw, headed to join the quivering droplet about to fall from the point of his chin.

Hammer tight in one hand, nail pinched in the other, I leaned over him. I’m not sure why I did it, but I bent low, pressed my lips to his, tasted salt and surprise.

Robbie opened his eyes.

“Don’t cry,” I said, placing the nail’s tip to the triangle of pink flesh cornering his eye and raising the hammer high.

Mike Keller-Wilson grew up in the Chicago suburbs and now lives, writes, and teaches dad jokes to a captive audience of seventh graders in Iowa City, Iowa. You can find him on twitter @MrWilsonEd.