Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (24 page)

“Where do you go to get your information? Ever been to an S&M bar? Nothing soft about that.”

“You frequent those places?”

“Nope. Ever hear of porn?”

“You don’t strike me as a porn kind of guy.”

“I’m not. I was curious when I was younger.”

“And are you still curious?”

“I think I’m more curious about art.”

He laughed. The drinks came. “Cheers,” he said. “Try this.” He pushed his drink toward me. I took a sip. “Nice,” I said. I looked straight at him. “So, you’re gay? Not gay? Curious? Bi? What?”

“Let’s just say I like to sleep with people I find interesting.”

“How many people do you find interesting?”

He didn’t answer my question. He grabbed his drink. “Michael. You—
you’re
interesting.”

“And you arrived at this conclusion by doing research?”

“Don’t need research. Sometimes I can just tell.”

He tried to sleep with me that night.

I turned him down.

“What? You have a boyfriend?”

“No, but I think you’re probably married.”

“Divorced,” he said.

Okay, so I let him kiss me. He was a good kisser, I’ll give him that. Not that kissing was a particularly difficult art. Any fourteen-year-old boy could master that art in one evening if he had a willing partner. And I wasn’t falling for Tom’s crap. He was used to getting what he wanted and
I wasn’t about to whore myself out for a night just because the guy was a good kisser. Besides, I knew this guy was trouble. Sometimes you could sleep with a guy and that was that. But not this guy. This guy wanted more than a night. He wanted more than I was prepared to give. I knew that from the beginning. So I told him, “Listen, we need to have rules.” I think he liked the idea of rules even more than I did.

One day, he called me in the middle of the afternoon. I had a crying student in my office. He’d shown me the belt marks on his calves and thighs, on his back. I wasn’t exactly in a romantic frame of mine. “I’ll call you back,” I said. I stared into the hurt eyes of this boy, this boy who was more angel than I’d ever been or ever would be. For a second, I imagined myself grabbing the belt away from his father and giving him a dose of his own medicine.
How do you fucking like that, sir
?

This boy didn’t need revenge. He needed something more, something I wasn’t sure I could give him. But I wasn’t the kind of guy that backed off. I was stubborn and I hated bullies. I looked at the boy straight in the face, his hurt pale blue eyes fighting to hold back the tears. “Danny, you can cry,” I said.

“Do you?” he asked.

“Do I what?”

“Cry? Do you cry?”

“Yes,” I said. “There’s a lot of things to cry about.” I lied. What was wrong with lying when you were trying to help someone?

So he nodded and his lips trembled and he hugged himself and he began to sob. I put my hand on his shoulder—touching was tricky business. “He’ll never hit you again,” I whispered. “I promise.”

“My dad says he does it because he loves me.”

“Your dad doesn’t know a damn thing about love,” I said.

I waited until Gina, the social worker, came by to pick Danny up. I didn’t bother to call his father. I let social services take care of the matter. I gave Gina the report. I trusted her. She was as tough as she was beautiful—and, on the side, she was always willing to show me what I’d been missing. It was more of a joke than anything else.

Danny looked at me. “Where will I go? Where will they take me?”

“Wherever it is, you’ll be safer. Gina won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

“What about my dad?”

Shit, why was it that kids like Danny were always trying to take care of a parent who didn’t deserve to be taken care of, that didn’t deserve their love, that didn’t deserve to be called
Dad
? It was too common and too sad to talk about.

“I’ll call your father,” I said.

He nodded.

I didn’t call him though. The truth was I was afraid of my own anger. I knew about fathers—the bad apples anyway. In my business I didn’t get to hear about the good apples. Yeah, I knew about fathers. I’d had a father who loved me in exactly the same way Danny’s father loved him.

I called Tom. “Still want to have a drink?”

I met him at the Dome Bar, downtown. I got there before he did. I ordered a glass of white wine and stared up at the Tiffany dome. It was so perfect and intricate and it filled the lobby of the hotel with light. I felt, for a moment, that I was in a church. But wasn’t that what bars were—churches for people who’d lost their faith? Hell, I’m not sure I ever had any faith. I don’t even think I believed when I was a boy. I remember making my first
communion and thinking,
God can’t possibly taste like this.
I looked up and Tom was standing there. “Hi,” he said. He looked calm and happy and I wondered about that. He was always hiding something—but I didn’t care about that. The part of him that was happy, that’s the part I wondered about. I wasn’t exactly sullen or morose or melancholy. But I wasn’t exactly happy either.

“Hi back,” I said.

“I wish I could kiss you right here,” he said.

“We should have met at a different bar.”

“Nah,” he said. “I don’t like the gay scene.”

That made me laugh. “You like it well enough in bed.”

“That’s not the gay scene, that’s two people touching.”

“Two men touching,” I said.

We sat and he drank and I watched him. He pointed at my glass of wine. “Still drinking those girl drinks?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

He smiled.

I took him home. It was comforting to be held, to feel another man’s hands on your body that made you feel, if even for an instant, that you mattered. It didn’t have to be love. It just had to be something that made you feel alive. “You’re quiet tonight,” he said as we lay in the dark.

“I don’t always have something to say.”

“You’re a mystery,” he said.

“I don’t mean to be.”

“You can’t help it. That’s just the way you are. That’s what I like about you. I could fall in love with a guy like you.”

“That’s a load of crap. You just think I’m pretty to look at.”

“That’s true, but that’s not why.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” I said. “You know the rules.”

“Okay.” He was quiet for a while and then said, “We make the rules and we can always change them.”

He was wrong. The rules were ingrained in both of us. He just didn’t know it. I took his hand and held it.

He spent the night. I made coffee in the morning and we took a shower together and I thought,
This is nice
. And, for a moment I thought that maybe—yeah, well, maybe.

I went to see Danny. He’d been temporarily placed in a foster home. He’d changed schools so his father couldn’t find him. He was living in limbo, though perhaps that’s where he’d always lived. Mr. and Mrs. Lucero, the foster parents, they were nice. Humble, good, decent, all of that. They doted over Danny as if he was their long lost grandson.

There was nothing fancy about the Lucero’s home, but they weren’t poor, not poor like so many people in this town were. The place was immaculately clean. Mrs. Lucero gave me coffee and she thanked me for saving this boy. That’s how she put it. I assured her I wasn’t in the business of saving anyone. She just smiled at me and condescendingly touched my cheek. I didn’t mind. If someone was going to condescend to me, they might as well be sweet about it.

Danny seemed calm enough—except when he talked about his father.

“My mom died,” he said. “My dad’s been having a hard time.”

“What about you, Danny?”

“I guess me too. He’s sad. And he’s mad. And he drinks.”

“Bad combination of things,” I said.

“My dad wants me back. He’s hired a lawyer.”

“Do you want to go back?”

He shook his head. “He says he won’t hurt me anymore, but I know he will.”

“You saw him?”

“Gina was in the room. She looked like she wanted to rip my father’s throat out.”

“Good for her.”

“I don’t know what to do, Mr. Steadman. My dad played like he was all nice but I could tell he was really mad. Gina could tell too.”

“Smart girl.” I shot him a smile. “Look, I have to make a phone call.” I stepped out of the room and called Tom. “Can you talk?”

“Just got out of court. Walking towards my car.”

“I need a lawyer.”

“I’m your man.”

“You don’t practice family law, do you?”

“No. Hurts too goddamn much. Rather work with criminals.”

“You know a good lawyer who does?”

“Sure.”

“This boy,” I said, “he can’t pay.”

Tom didn’t hesitate. “No worries,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

I went back to the kitchen where Danny was sitting. Mrs. Lucero poured me another cup of coffee. It was terrible, her coffee, but I drank it with all the grace I could conjure. She stepped out of the room and left us alone so we could talk. “You have a number where you can be reached?”

“My dad turned off my cell.”

“Let’s go get you one.”

We went to one of those places where you didn’t need to buy a plan. I just
filled the phone with plenty of minutes to get him through a month or so, and we were good to go. I punched his number into my cell phone and called him.

“There,” I said. “Now you have my number too. Call me if you need me.”

“Mr. Steadman, you do this all the time?”

“No,” I said.

“So why am I so fucking special?”

“Watch your mouth,” I said.

We grabbed a bite to eat. He ate as if he’d never tasted a burger before. God, that boy had a hunger in him. It almost hurt to watch. “I’ll be eighteen in three months. And I’m going away. And he’ll never be able to find me.”

“Where is that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’m just going away.”

I wanted to tell him that his father would always own a piece of him, that he would have dreams of his father chasing him, dreams of a father catching him and shoving him in a car and driving him back home, dreams where he could see every angry wrinkle on his father’s face as he held up the belt like a whip. He would have those dreams. I knew all about them. I couldn’t tell him that. He would find out on his own. He would have to learn how to save himself from everything he’d been through. Salvation existed in his own broken heart and he’d have to find a way to get at it. It all sucked, it sucked like hell. I didn’t know what to tell him so I lied to him again. “He’ll just be a bad memory one day.”

He nodded. I don’t think he really believed me, but he wasn’t about to call me a liar.

Tom and I saw each other every night for a couple of weeks. We went to a few movies and held hands like high school boys. It all felt strange and foreign as if I was inside one of the movies we were watching. We went for a long drive and
listened to his favorite music and he wanted to talk. Talking could be so easy sometimes, and sometimes it could be hard, impossible. Sometimes the words were just there and sometimes they disappeared and there was no way to get at them. But, Tom, I don’t think words ever disappeared for him.

He stopped the car and we took a walk in the desert. It was strange, the desert. I loved the stark landscape that refused to be tamed. I loved the mesquites, the cacti, the ocotillos that were like desperate fingers reaching out towards God, the rain bushes that held the smell of a summer storm in its stubborn sticky olive leaves. I thought of Danny. I thought of all the students who came to me. So many of them were like the plants that survived here, living without water. How did they do it? How did they survive? They came to me with a thirst in their eyes, a thirst, such a thirst, and I knew that I could never give them the rain they deserved, the rain they so desperately needed.

“Where are you, Al?”

“I was just thinking.”

“Tell me.”

“I was thinking about the desert.”

“You love it, don’t you? You love its austerity.”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“You could have been a monk.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“You’re a better man than you think you are.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Who hurt you?”

“I don’t want to talk about that, Tom.”

“Okay,” he said. We just walked through the arroyos. It was winter and
we were both wearing coats and even though the breeze was cold, the sun was warm. “I love you,” he said.

“You shouldn’t,” I said.

“Shouldn’t love you or shouldn’t say it?”

“Both.”

“Why can’t you just let yourself be loved?”

“Because,” I said.

“Because? Because it hurts? So fucking what? Love’s a hurting game, Al, don’t you know that? But it’s worth it. Sometimes it’s worth it.”