Chapter 27
At Duluth’s high latitude summer days were unusually long, and sundown was still a few hours away when David’s car crossed the Aerial Bridge. But the mist that had been hovering tentatively over the Lake all afternoon was starting to thicken into fog, making it seem later than it was. They didn’t speak, but the silent tension stretched the short space between them as tightly as invisible skin. Fortunately it was a short drive: a turn out of Grandma’s parking lot, across the bridge, and down Lake Avenue a few blocks.
As they crossed the Aerial Bridge he watched the flickering pickets of bars between them and the Lake and felt a inexplicable pulse of yearning and loss. The same feeling came back as they went up the outside stairs at the house and his right foot landed on a step whose creaking plank he’d replaced a few weeks before. He glanced at the windows and thought of how he’d carefully removed tacks and peeled off the winter plastic, tossing them to David at the bottom of the ladder and the unremarkable memories had an odd potency.
David didn’t speak until they were in the kitchen but Ennis wasn’t surprised at his words when he did. "Okay," he began. "I don’t mind your takin a day off and I know you’re due one - but what made you volunteer outta the blue like that?"
There was no way out. "Doc - I don’t know what I said I’d do. I mean, I was thinkin about somethin else and then I saw her lookin at me - she seemed ta be expectin me ta say something. So I just said yeah, okay."
David’s eyes widened and he started to laugh. "I never figured you for a daydreamer, bro."
"Damn it, don’t string me along - what’d I say I’d do?"
"Oh, you didn’t get yourself into anything bloodcurdling. Remember Andrea and Patricia - you know, her client, the lady who was with her - they were talkin about how they’re tryin to get the zoning changed in Patricia’s neighborhood? Andrea was assistant to one of the lawyers involved in a big to-do over where I-35 was goin through Duluth back in the 70s so she knows her way around City Hall, that’s why Patricia hired her. Well, they got a hearing with some of the city bureaucrats next week, one o’ their commissions, and those folks don’t listen to regular people unless a whole mob of ‘em show up. Otherwise, they do pretty much whatever developers tell them."
Ennis had a brief but apocalyptic vision of being called on to make a speech. "What’s that got ta do with me?"
"They made a lotta phone calls to people in the neighborhood, got ‘em to agree to have signs put up in their yards about the hearing. Not that big a neighborhood but still, they’ve got about 40 signs and they’re plannin to knock on people’s doors and give them a pamphlet they had printed up. That means hauling the signs around in Andrea’s son’s van, getting in and out every few houses - it’ll just take a lot less time if they have a driver and Andrea was lookin for volunteers."
"Hunh. Well - I could do that, I guess."
"It’s still early, I can play the heavy if you want," David offered. "I can call Andrea and tell her I really need you at the store tomorrow."
Ennis shook his head. "No, I did say I’d do it, don’t like ta go back on that. Unless you are gonna need me there tomorrow."
"No, I can manage, Jonathan won’t be back till Tuesday but Kelly’ll be in. But I’m kinda sorry you won’t be there," he added. "When we were on our way out, Vic stopped me and said he’d stop by to visit tomorrow around lunchtime. I told him I couldn’t leave the store but we could have lunch in the back. And I was hoping you’d be there."
On their way out of Grandma’s Ennis had suddenly realized David wasn’t behind him and he’d looked back to see David and Vic exchanging a few quiet remarks before David left the table and caught up with him. Now the thought of David and Vic alone with each other caused the barely-acknowledged tensions pinballing about his mind - excitement from their encounter at the Deeps, anxiety, resentment, defensiveness and the sudden fear of loss that had engulfed him on their way into the house - to collide in a jolt of anger and jealousy.
He took a step toward David, who saw for the first time an instant transformation in his face that would have been familiar to either Jack or Alma: jaw muscles tensed enough to be visible as ripples on the lower sides of his face, lips drawn in enough to resemble twin creases and eyes narrowed into the shapes of tiny twin hatchets. He took a few steps toward David, glaring directly into his face. "So what’d you want me there for, hunh? Wouldn’t I just get in your way?"
David looked startled but stood his ground. "Me ‘n’ Vic have never been anything but business partners, and he isn’t directly involved with the store at that. We’re just meetin’ to talk about Jeff - you remember him sayin’ he’d got some work repairing jetskis and ATV’s? Well, we’ve been using that back section as storage space part of the year; I wanna see if we can get him interested in setting up a full-time repair shop there. That’s the kinda thing me and Vic are involved in. Now, why’d you think I’d rather spend time with Vic than with you?"
While he felt slightly foolish, the memory of Sandy’s acridly dismissive remarks slotted in next to an image of Vic sitting across the table from him: confident, sure of himself, wearing clothes that showed no signs of wear and fitted him down to the last stitch; and David’s hesitancy at the Deeps earlier suddenly seemed to make sense. "Why not? He - talks ‘n’. . . . looks better’n me."
Damn, that was brilliant but David seemed to hear what was beneath the stumbling words.
"I’ve got no complaints about either," he said. "I know you’re not a talker - if I’d somehow managed to not notice that in Wyoming, I should woulda when I was callin’ you all those months. So what? Doesn’t bother me, an’ I didn’t think it’d bothered you till just now. As for his lookin’ better - that got anything to do with what Sandy said?"
Ennis thought of the men who’d come around Scrope’s ranch in the month before he’d gotten a final check and a promise for a recommendation: identical as sleek pigeons in business suits and highly-polished shoes that proclaimed wearers who had both time and funds to be preoccupied with clothes that fit perfectly and whose components all matched, driving rental cars as polished and indistinguishable from each other as their drivers: sharp-eyed men who looked at the land people had worked for generations as if it were a hastily-prepared meal to be eaten and excreted with little thought a few days later. Though they were dressed more formally and there were few women among them, they seemed close neighbors to the passing tourists who occasionally showed up for lunch at the Knife and Fork, glancing toward various regular customers and smiling at each other as if they were making a brief vacation stop at a roadside petting zoo. Both the businessmen and the tourists largely ignored him as someone living in a different and invisible dimension but as long as they were nearby his feet suddenly felt too big, his hands more calloused than they actually were. But these had been intruding visitors, outsiders who’d soon moved on; and he couldn’t think of a way to explain to David what it had felt like to brush against that world unexpectedly and be painfully reminded of how much an outsider he now was.
"I should’ve explained about Sandy as soon as we got outside," David went on. "Nobody thought any less of you because’ve what she said - hell, it would’ve been the other way around if she’d seemed to like you. I don’t know exactly what makes Sandy tick but the only friends she’s got are people she’s suckin’ up to and people who ‘re suckin’ up to her. I wanted to smack her and tell her to take a hike but so long as she’s workin’ at Grandma’s she can make things damned unpleasant for Maggie. People like that specialize in spreadin’ it around. . . . I’m sorry you didn’t have a better time today, I was afraid of that. I wish we’d been able to stay at the Deeps longer."
"Afraid a what?" This was the first time Ennis had heard David refer to being afraid of anything.
"I know you got a return plane ticket for the end of summer. Neither of us ‘ve mentioned it but that doesn’t mean I’ve not been thinking about it - I’ve been wondering all along how long you’d wanna stay here. You think I don’t know how hard it was for you to pick up an’ leave like you did? After you’d told me you’d never lived anyplace but Wyoming? I moved from Dixie to a place that calls itself ‘the air-conditioned city,’ for God’s sake! And at that, I had Maggie here and I’d known her for years."
The plane ticket, tucked away upstairs and untouched, had occasionally chafed in Ennis’ thoughts. "Yeah, I gotta ticket back. You want me ta go?"
"No way, bro. I know I oughta do the noble thing and say just do what’s best for you, and I know it won’t be any good if you stay here and you’re miserable. But. . . I love having you here. I just like being with you, we don’t hafta being doin’ or talkin’ about anything in particular…. Even when you first got here an’ slept for two days, and even that first day when you were settlin’ in here I had to go to work - I thought all day just about you being here when I got back. That and when we were goin’ riding back in Wyoming, I hadn’t looked forward to goin’ anywhere or doin’ anything for the longest time." The bluish-gray eyes looked into Ennis’ brown ones steadily. "I’m not gonna claim that I haven’t wanted more than that, but it’s a lot more’n I expected to have when Gramma Alex called and told me she was getting me an invite to that wedding."
It had been only a few hours since their outing that afternoon: clowning and chasing each other in the pool beneath the waterfall and a few minutes later, the length of David’s body next to his and David’s breath on his lips with the veil of water cascading over them; and a year ago - the excitement that had reverberated in him for days after those few electric moments during their horseback ride. Before he knew it he’d closed the space between them, slipping one hand behind David’s back to pull him forward and seizing the other man’s jaw and chin with the other. The desire he’d felt under the waterfall, briefly forgotten over the past few hours came back with sudden vehemence fueled by the past year’s simmering, never-quite-acknowledged attraction and he pressed David’s mouth roughly to his own.
He felt the other man’s lips part as his other hand traveled downward and pulled at David’s shirt, first thing it landed on, yanking it out of the waistband of his jeans so it could slide up David’s chest, hairier than Jack’s but he’d already noticed that. His fingers found one nipple and he felt David’s hurried staccato breath inside his mouth.
His head was spinning and he felt the delicious tightness in his loins that had just started gathering itself in the cold water earlier that day, picking up where it had left off. At the same time he pulled his mouth away briefly to catch a breath, his hand let go of David’s jaw, traveled downward to below his belly - and stopped.
He felt no answering heat, no rounded hardness filling the cup of his hand, only cloth and the outlines of the flaccid flesh underneath.
"What…..?" he said, more in surprise than anything else, a second before David backed away, face reddening with anguish and humiliation. Again, he wondered if he’d misunderstood after all. "Doc…. What’s the matter?"
David only shook his head, his eyes not meeting Ennis’ but seeming to stare at a despairing vision of their own. "Ennis, I - I gotta be alone for awhile, okay?" Without another word or look, he turned and left the room and Ennis listened to his footsteps withdrawing down the hall before the door to the outside stairway opened and closed.
Ennis stood for several minutes alone in the kitchen, listening to the inconsequential sounds around him: the clock on the wall ticking, refrigerator gurgling and humming, the distant sounds of traffic outside. In his confusion and uncertainty about what to do next, they seemed much louder than they were. He recalled now the frequent moments in the past few months when he and David had touched briefly or met each others’ eyes, moments when their mutual attraction had formed a closed circuit, and how some internal fuse had seemed to trip and make David look away, move slightly or change the subject. The dawning of what this had meant seemed to silence and block out everything around him.
Now he was hearing the threshing sound of the old motor in his truck, driving away from a campsite with the horse trailer rattling behind him and forcing himself to not look back at Jack, still standing near his own truck. He’d known that the mixture of misery, anger and resignation he’d undoubtedly see in Jack’s face would make him turn around and he’d been determined to get as far away as possible from the view outside the doors that last fight with Jack had opened.
There was no undoing it. He knew that he and Jack had a future in the mysterious world beyond where Jack now lived. But the life they could have had, the life he’d rejected, would remain a might-have-been to the end of time. The cabin at Lightning Flat would remain unbuilt.
It wasn’t going to happen again.
Index to previous chapters:
Chapter 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html
Chapter 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/523.html
Chapter 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html
Chapter 4: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html
Chapter 5: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
Chapter 6: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html
Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
Chapter 8: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2635.html
Chapter 9: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2947.html
Chapter 10: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3130.html
Chapter 11: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3356.html
Chapter 12: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3655.html
Chapter 13: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3934.html
Chapter 14: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4154.html
Chapter 15: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4591.html
Chapter 16: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4685.html
Chapter 17: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5094.html
Chapter 18: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5140.html
Chapter 19: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5546.html
Chapter 20: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6249.html
Chapter 21: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6434.html
Chapter 22: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6843.html
Chapter 23: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7306.html
Chapter 24: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7646.html
Chapter 25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7723.html
Summary, Chapters 1-25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8106.html
Chapter 26 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8417.html