“God almighty!” he gasped, catching sight of the heroic pectorals on display at the entrance to the rodeo arena. “Where do they all come from?”
“It ain’t the ranch,” said Bill. “Real cowboys have big bellies.”
“Don’t be so jaded. One of them’s got to be real.”
“Sure,” replied Bill, “there’s a real waiter from The Neon Chicken.”
Bill’s defective imaginative powers were beginning to get on Michael’s nerves. Inside the arena, he concentrated on the event itself—a raucous display of calf-roping, bull-riding and “wild cow-milking.” The latter competition involved a cooperative effort between a lesbian, a drag queen and a “macho man”—an impressive achievement in itself.
By mid-afternoon, most of the shirts had come off, turning the stands to a rich shade of mahogany. The beer flowed so freely that almost no one could resist the urge to clap along with The Texas Mustangs, billed as “the only gay country-western band in the Lone Star State.”
“I like this,” Michael told Bill. “Everybody’s off guard. It’s harder to give attitude.”
“Yeah,” said Bill, “but wait till tonight.”
“The dance, you mean?”
Bill nodded a little too smugly. “As soon as this dust gets washed off, all the little disco bunnies will emerge. Just watch.”
Michael didn’t want to agree with him.
Physician, Heal Thyself
FRANNIE’S UTTER DISBELIEF WAS REFLECTED IN THE face of the handsome, blond doctor who awaited her in his office on the Sagafjord’s B-Deck.
“Mrs. Halcyon! My God!”
Frannie smiled and extended her hand. “Dr. Fielding.”
“How wonderful to see you,” said the doctor. “I had no idea you were on board. I didn’t check the passenger manifest this time, and … well, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
Frannie nodded, already sensing the extreme awkwardness of the situation. This, after all, was the man who had brought the twins into the world. Would she be forced to lie to him about the “orphans” in her care? And would he believe her?
“I feel so silly about this,” said Frannie feebly.
The doctor’s smile was as white and crisp as his uniform. “About what?” he asked.
Frannie touched her mid-section. “Tummy problems. Mature women aren’t supposed to get seasick, are they?”
The doctor shrugged. “I’m afraid it strikes indiscriminately. I’m not exactly immune myself, and I’ve been sailing for a year now. How far topside are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your stateroom. Are you in one of the suites?”
Frannie nodded. “On the Terrace Sun Deck.”
“I thought so,” grinned the doctor.
“Why?”
“Well … the motion’s more noticeable up there. Usually it doesn’t matter, but when the sea gets a little choppy, the luxury suites are the first to feel it.” He winked at her winningly. “We peasants down here in the bilges have it a little easier.”
Frannie felt greener by the minute. “There’s not much I can do, I suppose?”
The doctor opened a white metal cabinet. “We’ll get you prone with a little Dramamine.” He handed Frannie a pill and a paper cup full of water. “Can you keep me company for a while? It’s a slow day. We’ll have the place to ourselves, probably.”
Frannie accepted readily. No wonder DeDe had adored this man.
He sat in a chair near the bed, while she stretched out. After days at sea with the twins, it was nice to have someone fussing over her.
They shared a long moment of silence, and then he said: “I’m sorry about DeDe and the children, Mrs. Halcyon. I didn’t hear about it until … somewhat after the fact.”
She thought her heart would break. She longed to share her good news with this gentle, compassionate man. Instead, she replied: “Thank you, Dr. Fielding. DeDe was terribly fond of you.”
After another pause, he said: “I was working in Santa Fe when I read about it.”
“Oh, yes?” She jumped at the chance to talk about something else.
“I had a gynecological practice there for a while, before I went back to general practice and landed this job. My life got a little … confusing … and this was as close as I could get to joining the merchant marines.”
“You must’ve seen the world by now,” said Frannie. “I envy you that.”
“It’s … not bad,” replied the doctor. There was something bittersweet in his tone that puzzled Frannie.
“Alaska’s extraordinary,” she offered. “There’s so much of it … and those fjords! They’re like something out of Wagner … so grand, so heartbreaking. I’m just sorry …” She cut herself off.
“Sorry about what?”
Frannie smiled dimly, staring at the overhead. “I forgot you never knew him.”
“Who?”
“My husband, Edgar. I miss having him with me. When you’re a widow, doctor, the main thing that hurts is that you’ve lost your playmate. You’ve lost someone who can look at a mountain with you and know what you’re thinking … someone to share the silences with. It takes a long time to build that … and it’s hard to give it up.”
“I know,” he replied.
“You aren’t married, are you?”
“No.”
“Have you ever had anybody who …?”
“Once,” he answered. “Once I had that.”
“Then you know.”
“Yes.”
Frannie hesitated, suddenly wary of becoming too personal. Then she asked: “How did you … lose her?”
Silence.
“I’m sorry,” said the matriarch. “I didn’t mean to …”
“It’s O.K.,” said the doctor. “I know exactly what you mean about those mountains. They don’t look the same anymore.”
The Hoedown
AFIVE-FOOT MIRROR BOOT, COMPLETE WITH SPURS, spun slowly over the dance floor at the Nevada State Fairgrounds, casting its glittery benediction on the assembled multitudes. The event was called “Stand By Your Man” and most of the dancers were doing just that.
Michael looked up at the shimmering icon and sighed. “Isn’t that inspired?” he asked Bill.
The cop regarded the boot for a split second, then frowned. “Goddamnit!”
“What’s the matter?” asked Michael.
“I forgot to get poppers.”
Michael smiled. “This is country music, remember? Not disco.”
“No,” said Bill. “I mean … for later.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe they sell them at The Chute.”
“It doesn’t really …”
“Somebody there will know how to get them.”
“I don’t need them,” said Michael. “If you’d like some, then …”
“I don’t need them,” barked Bill. “I’d like some, that’s all.”
Michael didn’t want an argument. “Fine,” he said evenly. “What shall we do?”
“I’ll drive into town,” answered Bill, sounding less hostile now. “You can hold down the fort here. I shouldn’t be long, O.K.?”
Michael nodded, soothed by his friend’s inadvertent rusti-cism. Drive into town. Hold down the fort. They might have been hitching up the buckboard for a trip into Dodge City. “O.K.,” he smiled. “I’ll be here.”
Bill nuzzled him for a moment, whispering “Hot man” in his ear, then disappeared into the crowd.
It was an escape of sorts, Michael realized. Bill detested this music. He had managed to endure the rodeo with the aid of his Walkman and an Air Supply cassette. He was clearly not prepared to commit himself to an entire evening of country songs by Ed Bruce and Stella Parton and Sharon McNight.
Michael was relieved. He felt fragile and sentimental tonight—achingly romantic—and he knew that those sensations could not long coexist with Bill’s horrifying literalness. It wasn’t poppers per se that had put Michael off—he got off on them himself—it was th
e soul-deadening way they sometimes reduced sex to a track event, requiring timing, agility and far too much advance planning.
How many man-hours had been wasted, he wondered, searching for that stupid brown bottle amid the bedclothes?
It wasn’t Bill’s fault, really. He enjoyed sex with Michael. He enjoyed it the way he enjoyed movies with Michael or bull sessions with Michael or late-night pizza pig-outs with Michael. He had never, apparently, felt the need to embellish it with romance. That wasn’t Bill’s problem; it was Michael’s.
Michael moved to the edge of the dance floor and watched couples shuffling along shoulder to shoulder as they did the Cotton-Eyed Joe. There was genuine joy in this room, he realized—an exhilaration born of the unexpected. Queers doing cowboy dancing. Who would’ve thunk it? Kids who grew up in Galveston and Tucson and Modesto, performing the folk dances of their homeland finally, finally with the partner of their choice.
It didn’t matter, somehow, that teenagers out on the highway were screaming “faggot” at the new arrivals. Here inside, there was easily enough brotherhood to ward off the devil.
Ed Bruce shambled onto the stage. He was a big, fortyish Marlboro Man type who spoke of golf and the Little Woman as if he were singing to a VFW convention in Oklahoma City. His big hit, “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” took on a delectable irony in this unlikely setting.
Twenty years ago, thought Michael, gay men were content to shriek for Judy at Carnegie Hall. Now they could dance in each other’s arms, while a Nashville cowboy serenaded them. He couldn’t help smiling at the thought.
Like magic, across the crowded dance hall, someone smiled back. He was big and bear-like with a grin that seemed disarmingly shy for a man his size. He raised his beer can in a genial salute to Michael.
Michael returned the gesture, heart in throat.
The man moved towards him.
“Pretty nice, huh?” He meant the music.
“Wonderful,” said Michael.
“Do you slow dance?” asked the man.
“Sure,” lied Michael.
Learning to Follow
AT FIVE-NINE, MICHAEL WAS DWARFED BY THE MAN who had asked him to dance.
To complicate matters further, this lumbering hunk clearly expected him to follow—a concept that hadn’t crossed Michael’s mind since the 1968 Senior Prom at Orlando High. And then, of course, Betsy Ann Phifer had done the following.
There was a secret to this, he remembered. Ned had learned it at Trinity Place’s Thursday evening hoedowns: Extend your right arm slightly and straddle his right leg—tastefully, of course—so that you can pick up on the motion of his body.
Check. So far, so good.
It felt a little funny doing things backwards like this, but it felt sort of wonderful, too. Michael laid his head on the great brown doormat of his partner’s chest and fell into the music.
Ed Bruce was still on stage. The song was “Everything’s a Waltz.”
The man stepped on Michael’s foot. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“That’s O.K.,” said Michael.
“I’m kind of new at this.”
“Who isn’t?” grinned Michael.
Not so long ago, he realized, men had slow danced in San Francisco. He recalled the tail-end of that era, circa 1973. The very sight of it had revolted him: grown men cheek to cheek, sweaty palm to sweaty palm, while Streisand agonized over “People” at The Rendezvous.
Then came disco, a decade of simulated humping, faceless bodies writhing in a mystic tribal rite that had simultaneously delighted and intimidated Michael. What that epoch had lacked some people were now finding in country music. The word was romance.
“Where are you from?” asked Michael.
“Arizona,” replied the man.
“Any place I know?”
“I doubt it. A place called Salome. Five hundred people.”
So he was a real cowboy. That explained the hands. They felt like elephant hide. Bill could just go fuck himself. “Salome,” repeated Michael, copying the man’s pronunciation (Sa-loam). “As in Oscar Wilde?”
“Who?”
Michael’s heart beat faster. He’s never heard of Oscar Wilde. Dear God, was this the real thing? “Nobody important,” he explained. “It doesn’t really matter.”
It really didn’t. He felt so profoundly comfortable in this man’s arms. Even his gracelessness was endearing. It wasn’t the man, he reminded himself, but the circumstances. Two prevailing cultures—one very straight, one very gay—had successively denied him this simple pleasure. He felt like crying for joy.
“Did you … uh … ride in the rodeo?” he asked.
“ ‘Fraid not. I’m just a construction worker.”
Just a construction worker! Jesus God, had he died and gone to heaven? Why hadn’t someone told him there was a place he could go to slow dance with a construction worker?
“What do you do for … this … in Salome?” Michael asked.
The man pulled away from him just enough for his smile to show. “I go to Phoenix.” He leaned down and kissed Michael clumsily on the edge of his mouth. “You’re a nice guy,” he said.
“You too,” said Michael.
They danced for another minute in silence. Then the man spoke huskily into Michael’s ear. “Look … would you like to make love tonight?”
Make love. Not have sex. Not get it on. Michael’s voice caught in his throat. “I’m actually … here with a friend. He’s just … off right now.”
“Oh.” The disappointment in his voice warmed Michael to the marrow.
“I could give you my phone number. Maybe, if you’re ever in San Francisco …”
“That’s O.K.”
“Never go there, huh?”
“Not yet,” said the man.
“I think you’d like it. I could show you around.”
“I don’t travel much,” said the man.
Michael decided against suggesting a trip to Salome. “Look,” he said, “would you believe me if I told you that this is better than all the sex I’ve had this year?”
The man grinned. “Yeah?”
“Infinitely,” said Michael.
“I’m stepping all over your …”
“I don’t care. I love it.”
The man’s chest rumbled as he laughed.
“You’re doin’ just great,” said Michael. “Just keep holding me, O.K.?”
“Sure.”
So Michael settled in again, lost in a sweet stranger’s arms until Bill came back with the poppers.
Over the Glacier
WHEN THE SAGAFJORD REACHED JUNEAU, PRUE and Luke went ashore with the other passengers and explored the tiny frontier town—a place heralded by the local chamber of commerce as “America’s largest capital city.”
“It must be a joke,” said Prue, puzzling over the brochure in her hands.
Luke shook his head. “They mean land mass.”
“But how …?”
“It covers more square miles than any other capital city. Everything’s out of whack up here. It’s further from here to the Aleutians, at the other end of the state, than it is from San Francisco to New York.”
Prue thought for a moment. “That’s a little scary, somehow.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It makes you seem so much smaller, I guess. Like the landscape could … swallow you up. You could just disappear without a trace.”
Luke smiled at her. “People do. That’s the point.”
Prue shivered. “Not to me, it isn’t.”
“Wait till you see the glacier.”
“What glacier?”
Luke slipped his arm around her waist. “I thought we’d rent a float plane and fly over the ice fields. They say it’s as close to God as you’ll ever get.”
Prue looked troubled. “Can’t He just come to us?”
Luke touched the tip of her nose. “What’s the matter, my love?”
“Nothing … I ju
st … well, those tiny planes and my tummy don’t always get along.”
“It’s just forty-five minutes.”
He pulled her closer until Prue relented. In many ways, she realized, he had already become her talisman against harm.
The float plane skimmed the surface of the water like a low-flying dragonfly, then lifted them into the slate-gray sky above Juneau. Besides Prue and Luke, there were four other passengers: a youngish couple from Buenos Aires and two lady librarians, traveling together.
Luke sat directly behind the pilot and conversed with him inaudibly, while Prue watched the alien world beneath her turn from dark blue to dark green to white. No, gray. A pale gray plateau as far as the eye could see—a living entity, sinuous as lava at the edges, brutal and beautiful and unexplainably terrifying.
It relieved her somewhat to see that the glacier had boundaries. Splintering and hissing, it tumbled into a dark sea where the water crackled like electricity. As the float plane dipped lower, Prue peered into fissures so brilliantly blue that they seemed unnatural, blue as the lethal heart of a nuclear power plant.
“Look, Luke … that color!”
But her lover was deep in conversation with the pilot, their voices drowned out by the engine sounds.
Prue leaned closer. “Luke …”
He didn’t hear her. He continued to interrogate the pilot, a rapt expression on his face. Prue could make out only two words. Oddly enough, the pilot repeated them.
She fell back into her seat, frowning. This moment should have been theirs: hers and Luke’s. This buddy-buddy business with the cockpit was inexcusably selfish, thoughtless. When Luke finally sat back and squeezed her hand, she let him know she was pouting.
“You O.K.?” he asked.
She waited a beat. “Well, what was all that about?”
“All what?”
“My God! You haven’t stopped talking.”
He pumped her hand again. “Sorry. Just … plane talk. I guess I got carried away.”
“What was that about dire needs?”