The City of Lovely Brothers (42 page)

"So you see, here you are, a doctor who likes his job and doesn't have to worry about money, you love your 53wife, you have great kids, and yet you envy us. Why should you need to ask if we're happy?"

* * * *

Jake gave Caliban and Nick his news over supper.

They were appalled to learn about Amanda. When Jake told them that Darcie had moved out of the main house and gone to live with Hester, Nick said, "She shoulda left him years ago. Darcie's a fine woman; she got morals. Calvin is a skunk, and that son of his is worse."

Caliban protested. "But Nick, Calvin's sick, paralyzed. He can't walk; he can barely move his arms.

You can't just leave a man like that to die, however mean he is, no matter what bad things he's done. Somebody has to feed him, wash him, care for him."

Nick sneered. "Let Calvin Jr. do it. Let Calvin see what a grateful offspring he raised."

"Darcie goes twice a day to the house to feed and wash him, change his bedding and make sure he's as comfortable as she can make him," Jake explained, "but she won't speak to him."

"And Amanda?"

"Living with Darcie and Hester."

"Do they have an income?" "There's the general store. I suspect the bank owns that, though, and only lets them run it."

"I can't see how Brandon and Logan put up with what he done," Nick said. "They could have him thrown in jail. What he done was robbery."

"They came to the ranch to confront him before going to the law. They thought they owed it to him because he's their cousin. But he had left a week before they arrived, gone to Denver to earn money and try to save the ranch, meaning Caladelphia, Calvin's portion. He's in debt up to his ears; he's mortgaged just about everything."

"What kinda job is that good-for-nothing fit for?"

"Your guess is as good as mine."

"So the bank owns everything?" Caliban asked.

"Not the workers' homes. Darcie sold them to them to pay off the bank. And I think most of the stores belong to the people who opened them now, too, but some of them will go under along with Darcie. A lot of people have had to mortgage what they own to stay above water."

"So you think Darcie will lose it all?"

"I'm sure of it. She may have already."

"Did you see her when you visited the ranch?"

"We didn't visit Caladelphia; we stayed with my folks the whole time we were there. I did see Amanda, though. Lettie went and got her." "How does she look?"

"Broken. Older than you."

Caliban had put his elbows on the table and was

holding his head in his hands. "This is awful."

"It ain't no good crying over it," Nick said. "I seen it coming. Maybe not happening like this, but I knew Calvin Jr. would land 'em all in the poorhouse."

"I don't even feel like crying. I feel too empty to cry."

"You really care about the ranch?"

"I care about Darcie and Hester and Amanda, and Calvin, too, him being as sick as he is, and Caleb's boys, too, but I wouldn't care if the earth opened up and swallowed that loathsome, rotten, miserable ranch. It's given us nothing but sorrow."

Nick turned to Jake. "So what'd Brandon and Logan do when Calvin Jr. wasn't at the ranch?"

"They left for Denver to find him. I don't know if they have."

"They won't."

"If they don't, I suppose they'll go to the law and let the police look for him."

They were too upset to finish their supper. Nick put their leftovers on a plate and put it in the icebox.

"I'm going to examine you now, Uncle Cal," Jake said. "Take off everything from the waist down —slippers and socks, too, so I can have a good look at your feet— and lie down on the bed. On your back to begin with. Chances are Nick and I will have to turn you a few times. This may take a good hour, and it could hurt a bit. Uncle Nick'll be there to comfort you."

"I haven't cried since Doctor Brewster broke my hip a second time and reset it," Caliban said.

"And he did a first-rate job. It kept you walking forty-five years."

Nick remembered two other times Caliban had cried

— the night after Caleb told him he loved him, and not just as a brother, and in Lincoln, when he told Jake about his suicide.

Slowly and painfully, Caliban hobbled to the bed and undressed while Jake got his bag of instruments. "Do you think you can help him?" Nick whispered.

Just as quietly, Jake answered, "No, I know already there's not a thing I can do, but I hope to learn something 53from him. In a month or two, he'll be in a wheelchair. I'll tell you what kind to get." He called to Caliban, "I'm ready now. If it hurts too much, you tell me, and I'll give you a shot. I'll give it to you anyway if you let out the least little yelp."

Jake felt around Caliban's hip with his palm, his fingers stretched wide. He put his hand behind the hip on his buttock, then on the side with his thumb on the hip bone, next with the ball of his hand on the bone, and finally reaching into his groin, with his thumb above Caliban's penis on his pelvic bone and four fingers on the inside of his thigh. Every time he moved his hand and pressed gently, he asked, "Does this hurt? Does this?" Then he took Nick's hand and guided it where he had felt, and explained what he felt there and what he would have felt on a normal hip.

"You can feel it on yourself," he said. "Open your pants and try; then compare."

Nick unbuckled his belt, opened his fly, reached inside his pants, and felt where Jake had told him to. He said a few words to describe how they were different.

"Well, those are differences," Jake said, "but not exactly what I meant." And he pulled Nick's pants a bit farther down and put his hand on Nick where he had felt Caliban, only through his underwear. Then Nick felt 53Caliban's hip again and nodded. "I get it."

Next Jake moved Caliban's right leg to the side to see how far it would go. Caliban's legs opened an inch or two, and then he said, "No more, Jake."

"This far will do, but we'll leave them this far apart if that's okay."

"I'm comfortable."

Then Jake moved slowly down Caliban's right leg, palpating his thigh and calf muscles, and palpated the left to compare them. Again he placed Nick's hand on the right leg and explained what he felt there meant. Finally, he examined both of Caliban's feet for about five minutes. "I'm going to turn you onto you left side now," he said. "Can you give me hand, please, Uncle Nick?"

Caliban groaned when they went to turn him.

"Okay," Jake said, "I'm going to give you that shot now, because this is just the beginning. You can stay on your back while I'm preparing the injection. I'll have to give you two shots, because there isn't much muscle left to hold the full dose, so I'll be sticking you here and here. It's going to sting a bit."

"You don't have to tell me all that, Jake, I'm not afraid of shots."

"Good, then I'll give you another in the other cheek to numb you from your navel to your knees. Nick and I will 53be able to twist you and prod and poke, and you won't feel a thing. But first I want to see you massage that hip, Nick. I won't be able to tell much once it's numb."

Nick and Caliban looked sheepishly at each other.

"Tell him, Nick," Caliban said.

"Sometimes, well, lots o' times, when I massage him, Cal gets hard."

"That won't faze me. As a doctor, I've seen more men's erections than they could shake their sticks at."

"He didn't get hard when Doctor Brewster did it,"

Nick said, "but I guess I ain't Doctor Brewster."

"No, you're Nick, and it's no surprise he does when you put your hand that close to his prick. No need to raise that eyebrow, Uncle Cal. We're taught to use medical terminology, but you two are family, and when a guy gets hard for that reason, it isn't a penis; it's a prick."

Caliban got hard when Nick massaged him. Jake

said he was doing the massage in exactly the right way.

Caliban was blushing. "So, Jake, whattaya think?"

Nick asked.

"About his boner? I think it has more life left in it than his leg."

"Cal's a cripple. He ain't a gelding."

Jake understood he did not just mean erections. "I was only half joking. Your leg and hip are in a bad way, 53Uncle Cal, very bad, and it's a relief to know you still have a lot left in life you can enjoy."

"I'd like my life even we couldn't have sex,"

Caliban said. "Just having Nick here is more than I could have ever wished for, and when he holds me in his arms at night, my heart is so full of happiness it could burst."

"I didn't mean right now," Jake said to Nick, who without realizing it had been stroking the head of Caliban's cock with his thumb. "That can wait until you've drawn the curtain and I'm asleep on the couch. And make it good for him; he'll have earned it. I have earplugs for the train. Now how about those shots?"

"How about me? Don't nobody care if
I'm
embarrassed?"

"A shot won't help that, Nick."

When Jake had completed his examination, he told them the medication would wear off in about an hour and he was going to eat the rest of his supper. Caliban wasn't hungry; Nick said he would join him in a minute, after he had covered Caliban and adjusted his position in bed.

While Jake was getting the leftovers in the icebox, Caliban whispered something in Nick's ear.

"What did Uncle Cal say to you?" Jake asked when Nick joined him at the table.

"Our secret." Caliban had said: "Thanks to those shots, you can ride my prick tonight."

* * * *

So he could see Jake off at the station, Nick phoned his work the next morning and told them he would be an hour late because a doctor was coming to see his friend Cal.

Then he phoned for a taxi. While he and Jake were waiting for it in front of the building, he said, "I can't thank you enough for all you done for Cal."

Jake was grinning from ear to ear. Nick's face

turned red as a beet. "You heard us, didn't you? Don't just look at me like that, damn you. Say something!"

"I'm glad I wasn't in your way."

They both started to giggle.

"Jake, Cal asked you this once before, but I'm gonna—"

"I know what you're going to ask, and the answer is no. I've never been tempted to have sex with men, and I'm not curious to try. But I did go over the top, didn't I? What it was is that you and Uncle Cal have some kind of running joke between you, a kind of a game, and I wanted to be part of it. You two are family, and I love you more than my own brothers." A few weeks after Jake's visit, Caliban could no longer get around using Nick's walking frame and moved to a wheelchair.

* * * *

There was one thing about Calvin Jr. Jake didn't know. Nobody in the family knew, though two of them found out about it later. The day he left for Denver, the Caladelphia blacksmith, to whom Calvin Jr. owed nearly one hundred dollars, came to see him in the office.

"I hear you're leaving for Denver," he said. "Think again. I ain't letting you outta this room till I'm paid." And he went to the door and bolted it.

Calvin Jr. blanched. He had no idea how the

blacksmith had found out his plans, but the man looked ready to kill him, and he had just enough money to get to Denver. "Why don't we see if we can work something out,"

he said, trying to keep his voice steady.

"Ain't nothing to work out. You pay me now or I break every bone in your miserable body."

"Maybe we can find another way for me to pay you, another way than with money."

"You don't own a damn thing, and I know it. Soon as you give it to me, the bank'll come and take it away." "If not in goods, then in services, if you take my meaning."

"I don't take your meaning. You'd hafta work for me five years to pay it off, and I wouldn't hire a scrawny runt like you anyways."

"Look, we're all strapped for cash now. Nobody even got enough money to go to town once in a while and pay for a woman. You ain't married, and none o' the women on the ranch're giving out…"

The blacksmith's face had widened in a grin as soon as Calvin Jr. said "and pay for a woman." Now he laughed aloud. "Cornhole the boss, eh? I just might for a couple o'

bucks, like what I'd give a whore. Might even be worth a little more. But you're crazy if you think your ass is worth a hundred bucks. I'll give you five."

They argued until Calvin Jr. had got the blacksmith to raise the price to fifteen. "I'll write you a promissory note for the rest of it."

"Your promissory notes ain't worth the paper you write 'em on."

"I'll write out a full confession o' what we done.

Sign it, too, and put the ranch's seal on it. That'll give you something to hold over my head. If I don't pay, you can show it to whoever you like."

"What if you don't never come back here? That 54paper might be worth fifty bucks to me, just so I can prove to everybody what a sniveling, shameless queer you are, but not a hundred."

"If I don't come back, you can show it to my ma.

She'll pay you for it."

"Okay, you take a piece o' paper and write a couple o' lines telling what you agreed to, and sign it at the bottom and stamp it with the company seal. We'll write in all the juicy details after we done it."

Calvin Jr. took a sheet of Caladelphia Ranch

stationery with a letterhead and watermark, wrote what the blacksmith dictated to him, and signed at the bottom of the page. Then he pulled his pants down around his ankles, turned to face the desk, and leaned over it, bracing himself.

The blacksmith gave him a few hard smacks on the ass, spread his cheeks, and pushed a finger against his hole, but men weren't his thing, and he couldn't get it up.

"Maybe I better help you with that," Calvin Jr. said, getting on his knees, and he sucked the blacksmith to full erection.

"This ain't the first time you done this, is it?" the blacksmith snickered. "I thought not, and I'm glad it ain't,

'cause I'll be able to give it to you hard and good like you deserve, faggot. I don't want you never to forget how I fucked your hole. I want you to have nightmares about it. I 54hope your ass hurts all the way to Denver, and the road is bumpier 'n a gully that's dried up after a flood."