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Mike is staring at a gaping black mouth, lit within by writhing tongues of fire. A broad dark shape flickers on the wall beside him -- a witch or a troll, keeper of this monstrous flame -- and it doesn’t occur to him for a moment that he might be awake. But then a shadow closes over the furnace. A metallic creak sounds, followed by a slam. He knows those noises, knows the burning pine smell and the snap of logs settling in a woodburning stove. The flamekeeper turns, lit now by an oil lamp on the far side of the room. She’s no longer a monster but a solid woman with iron gray hair, a flannel shirt, padded snow pants and heavy boots. He isn’t asleep, and he isn’t in hell.
He’s just back in godforsaken Idaho.
Idaho is like a video game Mike’s been trying to beat since he was seventeen. He’s played through all these levels -- Portland, Seattle, Scott, back to Portland, Scott Scott Scott, Italy somehow, then Portland again -- but he keeps waking up back where he started. On the same damn road.
“You awake, Sunshine?” Her voice is softer than he expects, and she shuffles back toward where he is lying or, rather, half-seated, half-sunk down into a deep chair. He’s buried to his neck in blankets, and when his hand moves, the chair’s arm shakes.
“I guess if you can hear me, I’m awake,” he says, then adds, “I’m Mike.”
“Ruby. My husband Gerald found you lying in the middle of the highway.”
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“You’re sorry?” Ruby laughs but then she leans close to get a better look at him. “You wouldn’t say that if this hadn’t happened before.”
“I have a condition,” Mike admits.
“You need to see a doctor?” It takes him too long to come up with any kind of answer, so Ruby goes on. “Gerald wanted to take you in to the urgent care at the county seat, but I thought you might be . .” Here she trails off so Mike can fill in. Might be avoiding the police, might be dead broke, might be a dirty big city queer who doesn’t deserve taking care of.
“I know that road,” Mike says. “I’ve been on it before.” This doesn’t follow but it’s the closest thing to a fact that he can grab onto. “My -- my father lives up that road.” He says ‘father’ because it’s simple to explain but impossible for anyone to confirm. The less anyone knows about him for sure, the less he’ll leave behind when he goes.
“What’s his name, your dad?”
“Dick.” It comes out fast and sharp, because he wants it to sound natural, like it has to be the truth. But when the word comes out, Mike hears it as a curse.
Ruby laughs, and that sounds like a curse, too. “Say no more.” She leans close to feel his forehead. “I had one of those for a father, myself.” The subject is closed, as long Mike wants it to be. “Your skin’s cold,” she says, businesslike. “Can I get you some brandy?”
One of the rich ladies in Seattle, who hired two or three boys together, liked to give them brandy and cigars. Mike hated the drink’s medicine smell and he only pretended to swallow it, but once he collapsed on her bedroom floor and woke up (briefly) to find her forcing the neck of the bottle down his throat. Like Ruby, she believed the stuff had some mysterious power of revival, but after choking a little down, he slept another ten hours and woke up (one of a hundred times he woke up) with his cheek in Scott Favor’s lap.
“I’m sorry,” he says to Ruby. “Alcohol mostly makes my condition worse.” He can’t exactly ask her for cocaine -- even if he had any money and there was a chance she could get him any, that isn’t how things work in Idaho. Maybe Coca-Cola.
“Coffee then,” she says, before he can get any words out, and coffee is perfect.
Coffee tastes like Portland.
*
An early winter weekday, and instead of the city’s usual lingering spit, the rain was daggering sideways. Scott and Mike took shelter in the skatepark under the Burnside Bridge. Mike had only come here a few times, because the skateboarders and punks were the wrong kind of misfits for him to feel comfortable. They always looked at Mike like he’d steal their shit at the first chance -- they were right; he would -- while Mike rarely had anything to steal, but suspected the skateboarders would beat his ass if they could get away with it. (They could get away with it; people mostly always did.)
But Scott wanted to come here today so he could get some weed, and he wanted weed because they’d stolen Bob Pigeon’s coke again and they’d been awake for three straight days. Now the coke was gone, and Scott said weed would help him “come down easy.” Mike didn’t want to come down, easy or otherwise. He liked being this awake, liked it even when Scott told him about a disease he heard of where you wake up and you stay awake and your brain won’t let you sleep and then you die. But what Mike liked most was being where Scott was, so he let Scott lead him to the park.
They struck out. Weather had kept even the die-hard skaters home, so there was nobody to buy from. They didn’t have any drugs, and nowhere to go even if they did go back in the rain. Bob had chased them out of the usual place; Scott always said the Old Man couldn’t stay angry at him, but whatever it was this time might need a while to blow over. Especially when Bob realized what happened to his coke.
So they decided to stay until the rain let up, or at least neither of them made a move to leave. Scott scampered to the top of the skating bowl, where he balanced on one foot. Someone had painted a huge green dinosaur on the far side, and Scott pretended to mirror its pose, growling and roaring then miming confusion at his own tiny arms.
Mike grinned but shook his head when Scott beckoned for him to come up. Mike got vertigo sometimes, on top of the rest of it, and he could all too vividly imagine pitching headfirst, Scott reaching out to grab him, and Scott falling too.
Or maybe Scott wouldn’t reach for him. Better not to find out.
Instead, Mike walked around with his head down to see if anybody had left anything good. Along with a zillion cigarette butts and some mangled roach clips, he found the broken off earpiece from a Walkman headset, and a Pennywise cassette with the stub end of a pencil stuck into the wheel. For a thrilling moment, he thought he’d found a twenty-dollar bill, but it was fake money printed with a naked girl in the place of whatever president, advertising two for one night (two what for one what?) at a strip club up on Stark Street.
Mike was about to give up. He could feel the crash coming. Why not sprawl out on this concrete bench and let sleep take him? When he opened his eyes the rain would be done and Scott would have carried him somewhere else. He bent over to test the surface of the bench, to see if it was dry at all, when on the ground underneath he saw a small miracle: a Plaid Pantry coffee cup, standing upright. Mike sat directly in the dirt, wrapped his fingers around the cup, then shook it and felt the satisfying swish of liquid. It was cold, of course, but when he pried open the lid, the dark heavy contents smelled like coffee.
“Are you going to drink that?” Scott stood over him, hands on his hips like Superman just arrived on the scene, and that comparison made sense because it reminded Mike how the two of them came from different planets.
“It’s not piss or tobacco or anything.” Mike dipped two fingers in the cup, brought them up to his mouth, and sucked in the chilly liquid. Strong coffee bit straight into his tastebuds. Scott crouched next to him now, leaning in with fascinated eyes. But right before Mike tasted the coffee, Scott’s nose wrinkled back into a sniff of distaste. When Scott wasn’t around, the others -- Budd and Digger, Gary and even Bob -- would mock his prissy affectations (the unnaturally good teeth, the habit of babbling poetry, the fact that he somehow owned neckties).
But Mike loved these tiny gestures, loved understanding that Scott didn’t really believe in a world where you feasted on what you could find because you didn’t know where your next feast might come from. Scott didn’t realize he was giving this truth away, and that ignorance made him more real. Mike wouldn’t tease Scott about his fussiness, because then Scott would know what signals he was sending; he’d try to stop, and Mike would have a little bit less of the secret Scott he loved.
Mike took a full swig from the cup. Without heat, coffee is all bitterness, and even as it sank into his tongue, Mike knew that taste would always carry today’s memory. He raised the drink toward Scott. “Have some.”
That little sniff came again, and it was clear Scott didn’t know he was doing it, because then he set his jaw and nodded. He took a seat on the bench, settled one leg on each side of Mike’s shoulders, and reached out to take the coffee. Scott sipped, then gulped, then puckered his face and shook his head, hair flopping into his eyes like a cartoon dog. “Uggh!” Scott played comical levels of distress. “This tastes worse than my cock.”
Mike giggled now (he was immediately embarrassed to hear the sound he made, the way it wasn’t even slightly cool), as Scott handed the coffee back to him carefully, without spilling more of its contents. “How do you know --?” Mike wanted to gesture, but it was hard while holding the cup, so he raised a finger, drained the rest of it down to the dregs, and threw it aside. Then he put his hands under his chin, looked up at Scott, and said, “Unless you are extremely flexible, I am the only one here who can make that comparison. And believe me.” He knelt in front of Scott now, and leaned into one knee with his ear. “That coffee wins the taste test.”
“I don’t believe you.” Scott spoke solemnly. He put his long fingers in Mike’s bushy hair, and, as he kept talking, reached down to his neck and shoulders, signaling him to turn around, and lie his head back into Scott’s lap. “I have it on good authority -- on the best authority -- that my dick tastes as sweet as cotton candy, my balls are as delicious as a prime cut of steak and my cum more savory than the finest Willamette Valley wine.”
Mike snorted. “Who told you that? Was it Bob?”
“Maaaaybe.”
“Because Bob Pigeon’s a liar.”
“Oh damn! He is! We proved it.” They both laughed now at the memory – ‘How do you KNOW the robbers’ coats were green if it was too dark to see?’ – and Scott moved off the bench, slid down and sat next to Mike. “What are we going to do now?” .
Mike had an idea -- Scott must have the same idea, or why would he have said it? -- but before Mike could put the offer into words, Scott frowned, sat a little way up, and said, “Huh.” He reached into his back pocket and shuffled loose a square tin. An old man with a drooping mustache stared at them: King Oscar Wild Caught Mackerel, and a gold banner underneath: “By Special Royal Permission.”
“These must be from Digger’s caper the other day. He and Budd went inside, Bob and I stood watch. We escaped, and. . .” Scott waved the tin in front of Mike’s face. “The victor belongs to the spoils.”
Vaguely, Mike thought that Scott had the expression backwards, but more important he thought that only Scott could carry food around for a week and forget he had it. It was a happy surprise, a mercenary reason to be his friend, though hardly the most important. Mike only realized how hungry he was as he watched Scott roll back the key to open the tin.
"God bless all petty thieves," Scott pronounced.
Mike must have been watching in an embarrassingly ravenous way, because Scott held a piece of the flaky, oil-dripping fish in front of Mike’s lips before tasting any himself.
“Here now,” said Scott, and Mike leaned forward, taking it with his teeth from Scott's hand. “You need your protein.” He was oddly stern now, earnestly parental. At the same time, he let Mike take the fingers deep into his mouth. Mike licked the last of the salty brine, hungry but also getting hard. These tight jeans wouldn’t hide that and right now Mike didn’t want them to. He circled Scott’s wrist with his fingers and pulled the hand from his mouth.
“You know,” Mike said, giving words to the thought he’d almost formed before. “It’s been a while since I sucked your cock. If you want to, you know. Get feedback on the, uhh . . .” He trailed off because there was a clever joke in here somewhere, but this didn’t feel like a time to be clever.
“Mr. Waters, I believe you’re trying to seduce me.” Scott laughed and touched Mike’s hair again. “You’re always saying cute things like that, trying to come up with an excuse for us to have sex.” Then he leaned forward and whispered in Mike’s ear, in a teasing, exasperating schoolyard voice. “Why don’t you just admit you loooove me?”
Mike pulled back. “I’m not always. . .I don’t ever. . . hardly ever. . .” He knew what thing Scott was talking about but that was only one time and it wasn’t even Mike who started it then. Beyond that, he didn’t like Scott making this a joke, but he wasn’t even sure which part he should be denying. Scott settled it by moving a hand to Mike’s thigh, walking his fingers up to touch the erection through his jeans.
“Looks like you’re the one who needs taking care of first.” Scott pressured him to lie back, moved a hand toward Mike’s zipper.
“What if someone finds us? Like, what if that cop . . .?”
There was a patrolman who had been around the neighborhood last year, who would catch a hustler at his business and take him into an alley or a patrol car, make it clear what he could do to keep from being arrested. He had only busted Mike once -- and that time his condition saved him; he passed out immediately and came to with his face in a storm drain, but the rest of him unmolested. But the possibility lingered, making him uneasy.
“Don’t you remember?” Scott laughed. “I got rid of that guy.” The cop had run across Scott at the wrong time and Scott punched him and ended up in the squad car. Bob had insisted on gathering resources (mostly other people’s resources) to go down and bail their friend out. But when they got to the station, Scott was being hustled out by men in suits. His father’s lawyers, Scott told them when he returned to the streets a few months later. The cop had never been seen again.
Mike put it together for the first time. “You did that on purpose.”
“I do everything on purpose,” Scott promised. He went back to pulling down Mike’s jeans.
“And if another cop comes along today?”
“Then we run.”
“Easy for you to say. I’m the one with my dick out.”
Scott frowned, considered Mike’s point, then shrugged and pulled his own jeans down, too. He wasn’t as erect as Mike, but he was getting there. When Mike moved to touch Scott’s dick, though, Scott shook his head and directed Mike to move his hands to the side. Mike gave in, opened his palms, and turned them to the sky (the sky that must be there, somewhere, above the rain and above the bridge).
Mike closed his eyes as Scott’s hand brushed the tip of his cock, then circled the shaft. Scott started to rub him, up and down, while Mike’s head tilted back and his skull rested on the cold ground. He knew without a doubt, now, that he’d be asleep before Scott finished, and that all of this -- the sound of the rain, the old coffee and fish taste in his mouth, Scott’s hand on him -- would carry him off into an ever-echoing dream.
*
“If you had any stuff,” Ruby tells him, “Then somebody stole it.”
“Not much,” Mike admits.
She looks at his clothes hanging by the stove: faded jeans, T-shirt, and musky flannel. “You won’t be offended if I tell you I want to burn what you have? It’s okay, Gerald has some things you can wear, and, well, we run a little Stop N’ Shop just up the road. We can order you a few things that maybe fit in a little better here. Assuming you want to stay?”
“Stay where? How?”
“Sorry, I got a little ahead of myself. The husband and I aren’t as young as we used to be. We could use somebody to keep an eye on the gas pumps. Count the change. You’d have to take payment in cash as we can’t afford anybody officially on the payroll, but --”
“Yes,” he says, maybe too eager but it’s almost suspiciously perfect. He’s never gotten a driver’s license, for obvious reasons, and if he does have a birth certificate or any of the other papers he’s supposed to have, they'll be at Dick’s, and he’s not ready to deal with Dick. Scott had, oh so casually, come up with a passport of some cousin who looked vaguely like Mike (blond and skinny), and this had been enough to get him to Italy and home. But on his first day back in Portland, Mike sold the passport to a guy Digger knew for ten dollars cash and a handful of uppers. It seemed like a great bargain at the time.
Gerald’s clothes are too big for Mike, but he makes the pants stay on with a belt. Ruby nods approval but touches his hair. “You got a bit of a rat’s nest there, son. You want me to try a hand with the clippers?” He lets her cut it short, almost 1950’s style, and when they order him a new pair of Wrangler jeans, which fit tight on the ass, but looser in the front -- Gerald says the cost will come out of his pay, but it never does -- he can imagine for the first time that he belongs in a town like this.
Ruby nods approval at his new look, but at the same time she almost apologizes. “Some places it’s just as well not to draw attention to yourself.” He understands what she means by this. There’s a chance Idaho might turn out to be his but it will never, like in the song Scott used to sing, be totally private.
Mike learns to keep an eye on the gas pumps and to count back change, though this part takes the most time to get used to. He’s handled rolls of money, of course, but you never counted them when the johns were watching. Mike keeps expecting customers to get mad at him for checking to see that it’s all there, but it’s just part of the job.
More uneasily, he keeps expecting Dick to walk in, plays out in his mind how that might go, but a few months pass and it doesn’t happen. The other thing that doesn’t happen: Mike doesn’t slip a fifty or two from the register into his pocket, doesn’t walk out and down the highway at the end of a day with the afternoon’s take, even though the owners frequently leave him unsupervised. Drivers come through from off the highway, a lot of them truckers and alone. Mike is pretty sure of the ones he could hop in with, and make an extra twenty bucks from, then keep driving to the next station or the next state. But Ruby and Gerald trust him. More and more, the customers who come through assume he’s their son.
Maybe that’s why he stays.
He doesn’t fall asleep nearly as much. Scott used to say it happened because of stress, and there’s not much stress here. But he does nod off a few times on the stool behind the counter; once he slips and falls off, and Ruby insists he see a friend of hers who is a doctor. She’ll pay for the visit.
Mike’s never really been to a doctor, except the free clinic in Portland, but as long as this friend will see him, Mike sheepishly figures he ought to be tested for a few things. The doctor takes this in stride, but he’s more interested in the narcolepsy. He’s never run into this condition but he’s heard about it, Mike may be surprised at what the drug companies manage to come up with. He’ll do some research, and Mike should come back next week for his test results.
On the next visit, the doctor tells him the good news -- all his tests are clean -- and the bad -- a treatment for narcolepsy exists but even if Mike had insurance. . . well, is there any chance his parents have insurance because he can use it until he’s twenty-two. (Mike knows about this rule, actually, because Scott used to have a card with his father’s name on it, and he’d let the guys use it when one of them needed an antibiotic or something that the free clinic wouldn’t provide -- until Gary broke his wrist, the hospital called the cops, and Jack Favor’s army of lawyers descended again.) But no, Mike says, he’s not in touch with his parents and even if he were they don’t have insurance
Well, the doc figured that would be the case. He just had to ask. Has he heard about a pill called St. John’s Wort? It’s completely natural, it’s been shown to do some good in these cases. Mike nods, says thank you for the suggestion, as though Portland hadn’t been full of health food stores, as if even the guys who paid extra to fuck him bareback hadn’t been keen to offer useful natural health tips.
But it’s not the doctor’s fault. Mike even hears him telling Ruby that he wishes he could do something, but the drug’s so expensive until it goes out of patent, the boy’s life isn’t in danger and the amount it would cost to treat him could cover five prenatal checkups every month.
Later, Ruby offers her own apology. If she and Gerald had the money to pay him, official-like, and cover his insurance, they would. But they’re barely just hanging on as it is, and a new K-Mart is supposed to open up near Ammon and that’s likely to take what business they have left. Maybe Mike can get a job there, when it opens, and get health care through them. Or the new president is coming into office soon, and his wife is talking about free health care for everybody. Ruby always thought that sounded socialist, and the wife struck her as kind of a bitch, but maybe that would happen and it would take care of his problem.
Mike says it’s the thought that counts. He thinks, but doesn’t ask, “New president of what?”
The St. John’s Wort gives him a headache, but he keeps taking it to make Ruby happy. At least, his sleeping hasn’t gotten any worse.
*
Ruby has a sister named Lu who keeps a farm a few hours east of them. Lu comes by every once in a while on her way to see friends in Pocatello. She’s friendly and matter-of-fact about this strange boy sleeping in the garage behind her sister’s store, and when Ruby and Gerald go to visit, they invite Mike to come too. The farmhouse is cozy, the food is so good that Mike has to remind himself not to inhale it, or stuff it into his pockets.
A younger woman, introduced as Roz, is the one fussing over the meal, and at one point Mike smiles to thank her and says, “I didn’t realize Ruby and Lu had another sister.”
Of all people, Mike ought to know better than to make assumptions about other people’s families, but when they all laugh, it is kind and knowing. “Sweetie,” says Lu, leaning down to kiss Roz on the top of her head. “We’re dykes.”
“Oh,” says Mike, and the only thing he can think to follow it with is, “Cool.” The others laugh and are ready to start talking again, but Mike clears his throat. He’s turning over not just the fact of what Lu said but the word, used in this cheerful and affectionate context. He wonders if he is supposed to use an equally cruel label for himself; he knows enough of them. But if he worries about doing this properly, he never will. So he swallows and says, out loud for the first time, “I’m gay.”
He has no idea what to expect -- shocked surprise or a withering “obviously” somehow seem equally likely, but the others all smile and raise their glasses. “Cool,” says Roz.
And just then it occurs to him that maybe it is. Maybe it can be.
*
Scott only ever really fucked him once before they came to Idaho together. Once that wasn’t a sleepy hand job under the bridge, wasn't putting their hands and mouths on each other because someone who was watching had paid them to.
This happened early, when Mike was just getting in with the crowd at the house where Bob was crashing. He’d had a lot to drink that night, had smoked something unfamiliar, and it came out of his mouth somehow that he was still scared and nervous about taking it up the ass. He knew he could do it -- he’d done it, he’d made money off it, it would be stupid not to do something he could make that kind of money for. But he couldn’t just offer, couldn’t be confident and casual about it -- and at that point he could tell he had already said too much. By admitting that he did it at all (a lot of guys claimed not to, even when Mike knew that they had), but mostly by expressing weakness; emotion; fear. Even it hadn’t already been clear Mike was that guy, the delicate twink with too many feelings, then it would be now.
So Mike let it go, and took the inevitable ridicule with the knowledge that he had absolutely asked for it. He went looking for another drink, hoping he could pass out for a while and forget the whole thing, when Scott brushed by, put his hand on Mike’s shoulder, and whispered in his ear, “If you ever want practice. . .”
If anyone else had said such a thing, Mike would have assumed it was a taunt and told him to go fuck himself. But Scott radiated such sincerity back then (not that he ever changed; only that Mike grew to know him better). “Yes,” he said.
Scott’s eyes widened. “Cool.”
That was the conversation, years later, that would turn into Mike always saying cute things, things directed at Scott, aiming to seduce him. He wondered, later, whether Scott actually remembered it that way, as though Mike had been spilling out all of his insecurities solely for the purpose of making himself (temporarily) irresistible to Scott. If Scott thought that, he was wrong. Before that night, nothing in Mike’s life had been about the attention of any other specific man. Afterwards. . .that was different.
They found their way upstairs, to a room that was more or less Scott’s. They undressed together, mocking each other’s shabby clothes as they touched them. Scott was big, everyone knew Scott was, but he was methodical, careful, generous with lubrication. He sat back and helped Mike slide on to him, showing him how to control the pace of the act, the amount he had to open up at a time. Scott also whispered advice like, “Make them use a rubber, it’s not worth what could happen,” even as he was fucking Mike skin to skin.
He could have said anything. Mike was too far gone. Before that moment, maybe, he could tell himself he had just fallen into this life because there wasn’t anything else for him. He’d rolled out of Idaho and landed in Portland and ended up doing this the way girls ended up dancing naked, because what else was there?
After, it was different.
When they were finished, Scott helped him clean up. Mike lay with his face on the pillow, catching his breath. Scott reached to touch his face and traced under Mike's eye with a finger that smelled like hand sanitizer.
“Bob owes me twenty dollars,” Scott said. “He bet me you’d cry.”
“Fuck you both,” Mike muttered, rolling onto his back, mildly surprised that he hadn't cried, but not about to say so. Then he looked up and around the walls of the room. “Bob wasn’t watching us, was he?”
“No,” Scott began confidently. Then he stopped and frowned, because he knew what kind of man Bob was, as well as any of them did. He got to his knees on the bed, limp dick dangling so that Mike had to giggle. Turning around to take in the room, he looked for cracks in the wall, visible vents, pictures that might have peepholes. Nothing obvious appeared, but then his eyes narrowed at a plastic figure that sat on a shelf. It was a large pink pig, maybe it had once been a bank, but at some point Digger had turned it into a bong; it didn’t take heat well, so it was a very bad bong, which must be how it ended up languishing on the shelf of the room that sort of belonged to Scott.
“There!” Scott pointed. “Don’t you see? The hidden camera is in the eye of the pig bong. If we can cover that --” He picked up Mike’s T-shirt, which dangled on the corner of the bed, and tossed it. The shirt fluttered and came to rest, miraculously, right on top of the pig. Scott raised his arms and howled, “Take that, Bob Pigeon. I fuck who I want!”
Mike collapsed back onto the bed, spasming with laughter. “There is no way --” he gasped out “No way that Bob hid a camera in the pig bong.”
“Probably not,” Scott conceded. He nestled down in the bed, nudged Mike to turn onto his side, and started massaging Mike’s shoulders. “But don’t you feel safe now?”
“Yes,” Mike admitted. “It makes no sense, but I do feel safe.” This would be the time to turn toward Scott and kiss him, except everyone knew Scott didn’t kiss, the same way everyone knew he had a big dick. So instead Mike lay quietly, taking in the feeling of Scott’s hands on his shoulders and understood what it felt like to be in love. But if you couldn’t kiss Scott, you definitely couldn’t say that to him.
“Scott?” Mike breathed in.
“Yeah?”
“You know you’re my best friend?”
Scott laughed but somehow it wasn’t a mean laugh. Instead, it echoed with delight. “You’re a funny little guy, Mike Waters,” he said. “I think you’re my best friend, too.”
When Mike drifted off to sleep, it was just ordinary sleep, and as he drifted, he told himself that what Scott Favor meant when he said “best friend” wasn’t exactly what an ordinary person meant by it. But then, Mike didn't mean it in an ordinary way, either.
*
When Ruby and Gerald go home, Mike stays on with Lu and Roz. Lu is the one who suggests it, and Mike agrees while Ruby protests. But Mike suspects this is what both sisters want, that they’ve discussed this being the best way. The store doesn’t really have money to pay him properly, and Lu insists that there’s always work on the farm. Mike isn’t sure; it’s not like he can operate equipment, and he’s never ridden a horse. He always managed to hold on to Scott’s back on the motorcycle, but Scott wanted him to hold on, and he’s pretty sure horses are different. There’s plenty that needs to be done with the horses, though -- feeding and grooming and walking them from pasture to barn. The horses take to him. He even learns to ride a little. If he has to take a nap in the straw, it’s not a big deal.
They give him a little bungalow next to the stables. They can’t pay him much, but they feed him up at the house. As far away from anything as they are, there’s a regular flow of visitors who share their table. They aren’t all gay, but they’re comfortable with Lu and Roz’s coupledom.
Mike starts letting his hair grow out again.
One night, the guests include three men who are -- and this is something that Mike would have assumed was a joke if they weren’t discussing it in such prosaic detail -- calf ropers in the gay rodeo. Not that it’s a fulltime job; they ride in regular rodeos, too, and sometimes they herd cattle.
The youngest of the three, a dark haired guy called Del, works for his father’s real estate business in Fargo. “I’m getting certified to appraise agricultural properties,” he says. “It’s fascinating.” He throws the declaration off with a grin that says he knows it sounds as dull as paint, but please don’t hold it against him.
Del has the best teeth Mike has seen since Scott; Lu just took Mike to the dentist for the first time in his life and it wasn’t pretty. He might have to work here for another five years just to pay off his fillings.
Somehow Del wants to talk to Mike anyway. The two men he’s traveling with, Jim and Will, are a couple. Del got into rodeo thanks to a man he used to live with and. . .well, Mike knows how that goes, right? Mike pretends he does; maybe he even does, a little. Mike doesn’t have much to talk about but the horses, but he’s learned by now that horse people find the animals endlessly fascinating, and after they’ve been talking for an hour on Lu and Roz’s couch, Mike thinks maybe he does too.
But it’s probably not the horses.
Jim and Will keep giving Del meaningful looks, matched only by the ones Lu and Roz are giving Mike. Eventually Del comes up with a reason to look at one of the mares that Mike has been keeping, and they walk outside together. The moon is out and Mike tries to remember what was ever so bad about Idaho.
They reach the door of the stable, and Del says, “I’d like to see that Appaloosa mare. But, uh, I guess what I really want to ask is can I kiss you?”
Mike stammers his answer. “I don’t have a lot of, um, kissing experience?” This is, at least relative to other kinds of experience, very true.
Del smiles. “I don’t mind if you don’t.”
Mike’s afraid Del has gotten the entirely wrong idea, that he assumes Mike is some kind of virgin who’s been blooming out here under the protection of his lesbian aunts. On the other hand, he really wants Del to kiss him. And so he nods. “Okay.”
They kiss against the barn door, for a long time; Del gets hard against Mike’s leg and Mike thinks about dropping to his knees, putting Del in his mouth right there. Would that ruin whatever fantasy the other man has formed about him, or make it sweeter? Beyond that, though -- does Mike even want to do that to Del, or is he just following a hustler’s instinct to make the customer happy? His brain starts firing in odd directions, and he’s suddenly afraid he’s going to pass out right here.
He steps back and sees Del looking sheepish. “Ahh, yeah. Sorry if I got too, uhh, excited there. It’s been a while for me, and you’re here and you’re perfect. But that’s no reason to put pressure on you.” Del gives a crooked smile. “I’m gonna be hanging around the farm for the next couple weeks, so maybe we can give it some time?”
Mike hears Scott in his head, saying, “An extennnnnded courtship,” which is a joke he would make if a client, like that weird German guy, would hire him for a few days or a week at a time.
“Yeah,” Mike says. “That sounds okay. It sounds great.”
Three nights later, they suck each other off in Del’s guest cottage, but not until Mike has given a stumbling and extremely incomplete account of how he spent those three years in Portland. “So, well,” he concludes. “I’ve been tested, I’m clean. I can show you the papers. But I’m probably not the kind of person you thought.”
“Honestly?” says Del. “I grew up in the suburbs of Fargo. Can I say that your story sounds kind of cool? I’m a little jealous.”
“Don’t be. It wasn’t,” Mike says. But he can’t put the conviction in his voice that he feels like he should.
Del kisses him anyway.
Toward the end of Del’s planned visit, he starts talking a lot about the rodeo that’s coming up in Denver. Mike listens politely, comments where he thinks he should, and is proud of how well he’s taking the whole thing. This was always short-term, casual. He’s known that from the start.
Finally, in the middle of a long talk about the differences between roping on foot and mounted break-away roping, Del says, “I’ve dropped as many hints as I can so I guess I have to risk sounding like an idiot. Would you like to come to Denver for the rodeo?”
“Oh,” says Mike. “Yeah, I think so?”
“You think so?” Del shakes his head. “Have you ever been to Denver? I know it’s kind of far.”
“I’ve been to Rome,” Mike answers.
Del frowns. “The one in Georgia?”
“Farther.”
*
Before he heads to Denver, Mike drops a letter into the mail, addressed to Scott Favor in care of his father’s company. Or the inner envelope is addressed to Scott. The outer one is addressed to the postmaster of Rome, Georgia, with a request that the enclosed letter be sent to the stated address with a local postmark.
Mike learned this trick from Scott. You could, Scott said, get a letter postmarked from anywhere in the United States just by requesting it this way. He used to do it when he was back in Seattle, where his father lived. He’d have five or fifteen postcards sent, all from different cities, to distract the old man with figuring out where his firstborn had swanned off to, so he’d never look under his nose.
That’s not Mike’s trick, exactly, but he never wanted Scott to know that he ended up in Idaho. He might not come back here, after Denver, but he doesn’t want to send a letter from a place he’s really been. Since Scott knows the postmark trick, Mike figures “Rome” will be enough to tip him off to the ruse. It isn’t that he’s trying to hide from Scott. He has a place in his father’s company; he has Carmella. The chance that he’s going to walk away from that to look for someone who was never really his best friend isn’t something that keeps Mike up at night.
On the other hand, sentimentality can be strange. Mike knows the dangers of chasing a return address that turns out to be nothing. He doesn’t want to give Scott any ideas.
Dear Scott,
This is Mike. I haven’t really seen you since Italy. I just want you to know I’m all right. I don’t have any reason to think you’ve been wondering if I am all right, but it might make you smile to know that I am. I remember some days when the chance to make you smile was the only thing that kept me from dying. So I thought if maybe I could do it, even from somewhere far away (I’m not in Georgia, you know how these things work), then whatever that connection was we used to have might be alive again, just for a minute.
[He doesn’t write, “You have money now. Send me some damn money so I can get some fucking medicine so I can maybe drive a car or get a real job. It’s the absolute fucking least you can do.” That would be pointless, and it probably wouldn’t even be fair.]
I met somebody. He’s a man. I’m gay and I like men, and you are probably sitting there frowning at this letter like you don’t know what I’m saying, you don’t even understand how this works. It’s okay. It was hard enough figuring out how this works for myself, I don’t pretend to know how it works for you. You left me in Italy, because you said that you fell in love with Carmella. I think you even meant it. I don’t know whether to hope that it was true.
I’m not in love with this man, not yet, but I think that I could be. Before just now, I wasn’t sure I could love anyone. When I tried to imagine it, I’d just get this picture of you. The time you threw my shirt over the pig bong. That night in Idaho, by the fire. (Do you even remember, now, that you ever went to Idaho?) Lying under the bridge, listening to the rain, eating smoked fish out of your hand.
I’m not thinking about that anymore. That’s why this letter doesn’t have any return address. I’ve chased too many cancelled postmarks. They do more harm than good.
I might write again. I haven’t made up my mind.
I loved you,
Mike