Chapter 28 - Part 3
“But then,” David said, “We both had our 30th birthdays, that was in ’77. And that was a kinda wakeup call. Here I was, in my 30s now, supportin’ a family but goin’ home alone at night, and I started thinkin’, how long is it gonna go on like this? I didn’t know what to do about me ‘n’ Nathan but I did decide I wasn’t gonna pretend to my family any longer. They were startin’ to ask me when was I gonna get a steady girlfriend, that kinda thing. And I was spending time around people who didn’t pretend, I’m not gonna say none of ‘em paid any price and people I knew who went to the bars and bathhouses every other night, I’d wonder sometimes what they were tryin’ to prove to themselves. But still. . . .
"Thanksgiving was what I decided on first. That seems to be kinda the traditional day - what?" He stopped momentarily, noticing the startled look Ennis gave him.
"Yeah," Ennis managed. "Guess so."
David continued to look at him for a moment. "Well," he went on finally, "when I told Nathan - he freaked. He was plannin’ to be in Macon on Thanksgiving, see, and he said ‘we’ve been hangin’ out together all our lives, you tell ‘em that and they’re all gonna look over at me. They’ll all think I’m gay.’ " David gave a short huff of breath and shook his head.
‘You know I ain’t queer’. . . .
"That should’ve opened my eyes if nothing else did, but I was still not seein’ what I didn’t wanta see. But I guess he did have a point, I would’ve been makin’ that decision for him and I didn’t have a right to do that. So I told him calm down, I’ll do it later.
"Ended up telling them on New Year’s. ‘Them,’ I mean my mom, Dean, and Gramma Alex was visitin’ that year along with Aunt Carol and Charlene. ‘You’re my grandson, David, nothing’s gonna change that’, was all she said. Maybe she’d always understood about Uncle Steve, I don’t think Aunt Carol had a clue and Charlene, she’d never paid me much attention anyway though she was sure hot for Nathan - hot for his money and his family connections anyway. My mom asked me what was my problem with girls and said I really should ‘get help’. I heard her tellin’ Aunt Carol a little later she thought it was just a ‘phase’, like I was a little kid. They didn’t say much after that day - middle class families are like that sometimes. Somethin’ they don’t wanna hear comes up once, they pretend to forget it afterward. Everything’s all about the surface. But overall, it didn’t seem as bad as I was expectin’.
“But that was about the end of those regular meet-ups with Nathan. We met a few times for drinks - always with other people there. I still kept comin’ up to Atlanta, even on some weeks when Michael was usin’ his apartment. We got pretty close. He was an older guy, remembered the bad old days pretty well. Kinda reminded me of my Uncle Steve. And I was kinda lonely by that time, even Maggie’d moved back up here a few years before.
“Then one day my mom called me all excited, said that Nathan was engaged to be married! She had them both over to dinner, and of course I went. I’d never met the girl he’d brought; he said he’d met her through one of the people at the agency but she might as well ‘ve been a friend of his family. Lived in Buckhead like Nathan did, went to a private girls’ school. I don’t know if she’d entered any beauty contests like Charlene, but she sure looked like she had. Nothin’ against her, actually she seemed very sweet but together, they looked one of those stock photos they put in new wallets and picture frames.
“Nathan didn’t have much to say to me at that dinner and I didn’t try to get him alone. Didn’t see much of him for months after that. Then in spring of ’79 I went to call him and got no answer, and a few phone calls later I found out why. He and his fiancée had broke up. Supposedly over his drinkin’ and the drugs, I wondered if that was it but that definitely had got out of control. He didn’t have his job any longer - not that he needed it to make a living - and he’d checked himself into a rehab center to dry out.
“Of course I went to see him right away, and got quite a shock when I saw him. We were born on the same day and he looked ten years older’n me, maybe that’d been happening all along and I hadn’t noticed."
Ennis saw a glimmer out of the corner of one eye, two tiny dots of light in the thickening fog. He turned just quickly enough to see the catlike eyes of elusive creature he’d seen a few times before, reflecting light in that dense atmosphere where there was little light to reflect. A slight movement and it was gone, but the air suddenly seemed colder and damper and added to the sadness and reflected guilt that David’s story had stirred was a vague and growing dread.
David was leaning over, elbows on his knees and his head in his hands as if he were trying to squeeze the memories out. "O’ course this was in a ritzy drunk tank, you know, so I didn’t expect to see him lookin’ his best. It was the way he acted. He was just so quiet, not just quiet like not sayin’ much, more like. . . there just wasn’t anything he cared to say. He said he was leavin’ the place next week and I asked him to come down to Macon and stay at my place for awhile. ‘Who’s to tell you your stepbrother can’t help you out?’ was how I put it to him and I expected an argument but he said okay.
"I picked him up a week later and he wanted us to stop by his place so he could pick up his car. No reason he couldn’t drive himself, and I thought he’d just bring some extra clothes but he brought out some paints and art supplies. He’d pretty much stopped painting the past few years. And not just that, before he was always pickin’ up a pen or pencil and just sketchin’ things, kinda like some people hum to themselves a lot. Somewhere in those years that stopped too. He set up his stuff in an extra room by a window and I thought maybe he was workin’ during the day while I was at the store but he didn’t seem to want me to see what he was workin’ on.
"When I think of all the things I made myself believe, all those years…. and I knew something was really wrong but I kept thinkin’ he’s so run down, he’s got a lot of recoverin’ to do, I’d waited for years, I could wait a little longer. He just seemed to… just accept things as they came. He didn’t seem unhappy - just didn’t seem…. anything.
"That all came an end toward the end of the summer -- third week in August, a real hot, sticky day. I got home a little early and Nathan wasn’t alone, there was a man I hadn’t met but I knew who he was when Nathan said his name. Lots o’ people in Macon knew who he was. He was a pharmacist, had his own drugstore - the kind where they sell a lot of medical supplies. But he made most of his money in the back sellin’ drugs. He had a rep for hangin’ out with really scuzzy people, rumor was they were into everything from contract killin’ on down. Nathan acted real nervous, I could tell he was tryin’ to get the guy to leave quick and I heard him say I was his stepbrother, he was just down visitin’ for a few days.
"I don’t know, maybe it was the heat, maybe it was just the last straw after all those years of gettin’ bits and pieces of his time. But I thought, damn, this guy is a sleazoid who’d sell junk to people he knew were close to dyin’ from it; and Nathan was ashamed of me. I was the one he wanted to hide. I just couldn’t take it anymore and God, I got so furious at him. Don’t even remember half of what I said except the last thing - ‘get on with your life without me, I’m done!’ And I left.
“I just went out drinkin’. Real useful, right? But I don’t know what else you do when it finally hits you that you’ve spent years trying for something and have nothing to show for it. Not that it helped - I ended up goin’ back home just feelin’ sleepy and kinda sick. Nathan wasn’t there, and I didn’t even bother goin’ to bed, just lay down on the sofa and passed out.
“Don’t know how long after that it was - for that matter, I’ll never know for sure if it really happened or if I just dreamed it. But I woke up and Nathan was back. In more ways than one.”
He half-sat up, body feeling grimy and crumpled, and looked down at Nathan sitting on the floor with his head on the sofa cushions. “Davey. . . .”
Somehow, their childhood nicknames of “Nate” and “Davey” had vanished at a vague point between their junior year in high school and their arrival at college, and David had given no thought to either. “I’m still here, Davey. I just had to hide out. . . couldn’t help it.”
“I know.”
“I messed up. . . this wasn’t what we planned.” David wasn’t sure what he was talking about and said nothing to that; just briefly stroked the disheveled hair that had dimmed from exuberantly blonde to a drab grayish-yellow color.
“It’s still summer. . . we can go back to Rose Hill. Right?” They had not been there in years, since an otherwise-forgotten spring break when the flowers planted in the cemetery that had broken loose and gone wild were in bloom. “Go back. . . start over. . .“
David felt as if he were disintegrating. “Yeah, Nate. We’ll do that.” As recently as yesterday the words themselves would have suggested the arrival at last of what he’d been waiting for; now he understood somehow that they were a leave-taking.
“I never have figured out if he was really there, or if I was dreaming it. Or if he’d come to say goodbye. But I woke up right after that and, God help me, went back to sleep. Never have figured out how much time had passed, but it was daybreak when I woke up.
“I tried to tell myself later, I didn’t know what he was gonna do, but lookin’ back on it - how could I not know? Nathan’d always been so driven, so hyper, always jazzed about something. He wasn’t anything like that those last months, seemed to be just coasting along, but I put that down to his drug problems. But he got so calm, just seemed to take everything as it came…. I’d heard that’s how people get sometimes when they decide to end it themselves, sorta resigned. But I didn’t wanna see it.
“And maybe I coulda stopped it if I’d followed him but I just didn’t have the juice for it. Passed every car on I-75 all the way up to Atlanta, it’s just 90 miles but seemed to take forever, and I kept telling myself it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, he just went home an’ crashed.
“If he’d taken an overdose of something, maybe I woulda got there in time. But I didn’t find him in his apartment, started to think he didn’t even go home, so I went to check the garage and see if his car was there. . . He’d shut the door, of course, and the engine had run outta gas by the time I got there.
“For a long time I couldn’t remember Nathan like he was when we were sneakin’ out to Rose Hill, or at college, or even in Atlanta afterward - I just had what I saw in that car burned into the back of my eyeballs. Don’t think it took him long to die but he’d thrown up, and his skin…. It looked like... a bad sunburn. Don’t remember much after that, I think it was a neighbor who called the police. That was the worst of it, that morning, but what happened after wasn’t any picnic either.”
Third week in August. One of the few meet-ups where he and Jack had slept and enjoyed each other in a bed instead of on a pile of sleeping bags in a tent; had cooked on a stove instead of over a fire, thanks to Don Vroe’s loan of a cabin. A trivial memory intruded: waking up the first morning to discover that he’d forgotten both the bread and bacon he was to bring, and driving the five miles down to the highway at first light just before daybreak. Oddly, one of the most vivid memories of that trip was the brief unexpected euphoria of the drive back: windows open to the cool, crackling freshness of the morning air, imagining the fragrance of bacon and how Jack always looked shortly after waking up: hair in a thick, soft tangle and eyes still languorous and half-hooded with recent sleep.
The possibility of both David’s frantic drive to Atlanta and his own early-morning errand taking place on the same morning, within a few hours of each other at the most, stunned him enough that he almost missed what David said next. That the two experiences took place in the same world, and not in different realms of space and time altogether, was impossible to make any sense of.
“After I’d come out to my family, I’d figured Dean mighta told some of our relatives, I doubt my mom would’ve. She would’ve told herself “that” just didn’t happen in our family. But they all found out about Nathan by the time of the funeral went down - I found out later that the cops let the family attorney into Nathan’s apartment, and he found a couple of magazines. I don’t know if they were X-rated stuff or just some o’ the body-building magazines we useta look at years ago when we were in high school, but that was enough. My family put two ‘n’ two together. So did Nathan’s family.
“My brother met me on the front porch when I got to our house in Macon, told me not to come in. I’d thought it was just him that was mad, insisted Mother come out which didn’t take her long - I figure she was listening in the front room. Nathan was about as much my son as he was Sheila’s, she kept sayin’, he never woulda thought of doin’ such a thing if you hadn’t turned him gay. “Cept of course she didn’t say “gay”, she said turned him into a pervert. Bad enough you’re living the way you are, she said, now you took Nathan away from all of us. And she kept sayin’ over and over, how could you do this to me? Like it was something I’d planned. Like she was the only one who’d lost anything.
"There's so much about that time I'm not proud of- I didn't even want to go to the funeral. I really think he’d 've wanted to be buried in Rose Hill, or cremated and his ashes scattered there, but I didn't have any say in it. They buried him in Arlington Cemetery in Atlanta, in the family plot, and God, I didn't want to sit there and look at that coffin and know that was all that was left of him now.
"But I went. Partly just out of anger, not proud o' that either. I could just hear all those people chewin' over it if I wasn't there: why didn't he show up, they grew up together, oh didn't you hear, they were more'n just fnends he's probably ashamed to show his face. As it was, I know they were disappointed I didn't fall apart, get mad, something they could gossip about the next time they decided to do lunch. I know how people are - they love a show, 'specially when somebody dies. Don't I know it. The whole clan of ‘em, Nathan’s family, showed up at the funeral and they weren’t hardly speaking’ to me any more’n Mother and Dean and a few of our other relatives. They all knew about Nathan and me by then, of course.
Ennis was puzzled at that. “But you mentioned once - you n’ Nathan hardly ever saw ‘em.”
“Never saw was more like it with most of ‘em. But rich people, they’re always connected, it’s like they carry around this gossipy small town with ‘em everywhere they go. Yeah, they knew all right.
“Don’t know how I woulda sat through it at that, if it weren’t for Gramma Alex. She called and told me what motel she and my aunt were stayin’ at and asked if I’d give ‘em a ride, and she sat with me all the way through it. Afterward, when we were goin’ to the cemetery, Mother and Dean went out to their car without a word to me; Gramma Alex was about the only person there speakin’ to me at all. Well, her and Aunt Carol and Charlene, I could tell she’d let them know they’d better, or else.”
He shook his head, with a faint smile. “No one ever knew what ‘or else’ was - they never wanted to know. I’ll always owe my grandmother one for that, it was the reason I went to the wedding. I hadn’t even heard about it - I hardly knew any of the folks in Colorado - but Gramma Alex kept up with all the relatives, and she called and asked if I’d come, said she’d make a few phone calls and get them to send me an invitation. I knew it might be the last time I saw her - it was, as it turned out.”
He turned and looked at Ennis, who’d just notice that they were both shivering. “And of course, I’m glad I did - for more than one reason, but I wouldn’t blame you if you’re not.”
Ennis thought of their visit to the Riverton bar after the wedding reception: how deftly David had used just a few smiles and well-chosen sentences to make two men walking into a small-town Wyoming bar together wearing suits and ties seem perfectly natural. In his way, David was as wary as Ennis of the tire iron, and of more genteel bludgeons as well - the sly joke, the avidly curious glance, the just-audible whisper - and had polished and crafted a natural talent into a defense. The fog had now enveloped them so completely that it seemed as if they were two outcasts huddling together for protection in a damp and chilly corner at the edge of the world.
Index to 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
Chapter 26 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8634.html
Chapter 27: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8869.html
Chapter 28 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9090.html
Chapter 28 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9371.html