Best Gay Romance 2011, page 13
Our handfasting even made the society page of the Northwest Bugle. The article made no mention of a fizzled scandal that had rocked the Last Hope Baptist Church two years earlier. It only mentioned that I had been head of the English Department at Millard Fillmore High School for the past year and that Aeslin had been selected as a contestant designer for “Project Runway.”
LAST CALL AT THE RAVEN
Simon Sheppard
A misty night out on the Interstate.
Derek shook his head slowly, staring at the fog-wreathed bar. It was a low, nondescript building, the neon reading THE RAVEN now dark over the door. No rainbow flag out front, not for this place deep in closet country. The Raven wasn’t a “life-style choice,” it was a refuge, the sort of joint that, on a typical Saturday night, played host to guys from miles around: some young student types, others married men sneaking around with hard-ons, a stray would-be leatherman or two, even a sprinkling of diesel dykes, all slugging down drinks while a local drag queen lip-synched to disco.
The light over the door flashed on, blurry fire-red piercing the dark of night. Derek crossed the parking lot, past Fords and Chevys and a few pickup trucks, and walked up to the entrance. He swung open the heavy door. A blast of heat, music and cigarette smoke hit the cool outside air. He crossed the threshold, plunging into the smells of stale beer and deferred desire. The crowd was sparse, no one familiar to him. But then, he hadn’t been there in a very long while. As he walked down the length of the dimly lit bar, no one so much as looked up. It wasn’t till he was all the way at the back of the long, narrow room that he saw him in the murk, leaning back against the wall.
Jono.
For one long minute, Derek couldn’t believe his eyes. Then, slowly, as though not wanting to make Jono dematerialize into the smoke-filled air, he walked toward the man he had loved so long, so deeply. Jono’s eyes never left his.
“Fuck,” he stammered, when they were, at last, only a foot or two apart, “I thought you…”
“Were gone forever?”
“Yeah.” Derek’s eyes filled with tears.
“Well, I’m not. Gone forever. As you can see.”
“As I can see, yeah.” And then he didn’t know what to say next. There was so much. There was nothing, really.
“I didn’t want to leave you, Derek.”
Love is pain, Derek thought. Oh, god, love is pain. “I know,” he said at last.
Jono reached out his hand. A breeze, somehow cool, passed over Derek’s body.
And then the two men fell into each other’s arms. The music grew more pounding, insistent. Neither of them minded at all.
And then it was if they were back walking through the woods, the evening they’d first met at the Raven, hand in hand, not caring who saw them.
“This is beautiful,” Jono had said, and it had been, the pale moonlight filtering liquidly through the leaves.
And that’s when the bashers had struck, three of them coming up from behind, though the injuries hadn’t been that bad, really: Jono’s lip had been split, Derek had needed a few stitches. And going through the attack hadn’t scared them, not really. If anything, it brought them closer together. And that night, Jono had held Derek tight until they both drifted off to a peaceful sleep.
The memory faded, and Derek was back at the Raven. For a moment, Jono seemed to fade in and out of focus, then became solid again.
“I almost lost you,” Derek said.
Now it was Jono’s turn to look as if he might cry. Derek hugged him again, harder this time, holding on as though he might fade away. They kissed. Jono’s mouth tasted of earth.
The already dim light in the bar faded further, all except for a spotlight over a makeshift stage in the corner. Derek moved around beside Jono, and they stood there, arms around each other. Even in the dimness, Derek could see that the bar had filled up a bit, some of the newcomers looking familiar, regulars from back in the day.
The music changed: a gay-bar cliché, “I Will Survive.” A plump drag queen with enormous fake tits just barely contained by a sequined dress climbed onstage, lip-synching and gesticulating broadly. Derek remembered her name—Polly Andrus—and smiled. Jono’s arm tightened around his waist.
Life is sweet, Derek thought. So sweet.
After the beating, Derek and Jono had started seeing each other on a regular basis. It wasn’t “dating,” not really, since except for nights at the Raven, they didn’t go out anywhere together, not even to the movies. Maybe it was because they were still cautious, maybe not. But within a couple of months, Jono had moved into Derek’s little house out on the edge of town. Derek went out on his rounds for UPS while Jono stayed at home, making stained-glass boxes that he sold on consignment through antique stores in the area. They loved each other, it turned out, very much.
The drag queen ended her number to a not particularly encouraging smattering of applause. “It’s smoky in here. Want to go outside?” Jono asked. Derek hesitated, then agreed. On the way out of the bar, a few of the patrons, the familiar-looking ones, nodded. None of them was a close friend; nobody spoke. But Derek noticed that a few of them, now that he was taken, was with Jono, regarded him with looks of undisguised lust.
The moon was pale and full, the air autumnally chilly. The two men left the red glow cast by the bar’s neon sign and walked around the side of the building, out to where the parking lot ended and the field began. In the spectral moonlight, Jono looked almost transparent.
As they stood side by side, Jono reached out for Derek’s hand.
“Your hand is cold,” Derek said.
“What did you expect?”
It hadn’t been easy, living together in an area where male cohabitation was often viewed with suspicion; a suspicion that was, in their case, justified. Still, apart from a few hostile glances at the supermarket, they were mostly left to themselves, and their life together relaxed into a comfortable routine. Derek was the one who did the laundry. Jono cooked. Derek was the one who got fucked, usually. The stained glass boxes that Jono made were featured in a magazine article, and his business grew. Derek was glad for him. Side by side. Comfortably together.
Derek looked out across the fields. “I still love you, you know,” he said.
“Of course.” Jono’s voice was low, almost a whisper. “And I still love you.”
“Forever.”
“Forever, yes.”
And then the symptoms had begun. Nothing very definite at first. Jono felt more tired more often. And then things grew more definite, to where the situation could no longer be denied.
“There are new treatments out there,” Derek had said. “New treatments coming along all the time.”
But Jono still had grown weaker and weaker, thinner and thinner, until his flesh seemed almost transparent, pale as memory. Derek bought him a topaz and sterling silver ring; it had rattled around on his bony finger.
Toward the end, Jono had said, “I’m only afraid I’ll have come and gone, but left no trace. Y’know?”
“My love,” Derek had said, “as long as I’m here, you’ll be here, too.”
Arm in arm now, they looked out across the fields. Cars were pulling in and out of the parking lot, their headlights sweeping across the unnaturally dense mist, right to left, left to right, but the two men seemed to cast no shadows.
“Fuck me,” Derek said. “One last time.”
Jono nodded. The two walked into a little grove of trees at the edge of the parking lot. There was no one else around. Derek lowered his pants and leaned face-forward against an oak. Using nothing but spit, Jono entered him. There was no resistance.
When they were done, they walked out of the trees, out to the fog-wreathed field.
Jono pressed something into Derek’s hand.
The day that Jono died, Derek had gone into the spare room he had used as a studio. One by one, he picked up the stained glass boxes, the half-finished ones, the ones that Jono had completed and were awaiting shipment, and threw them against the wall. Shards of glass littered the floor, shining, colorful.
Derek closed his hand tight around the small, hard object.
“Good-bye, my love.” Jono’s voice was soft, so soft, as if it were coming from far, far away.
“Don’t leave me,” Derek said, “again. Please.”
No use. Jono smiled at Derek, gave him a squeeze, and set off across the field. As he walked toward the unseen horizon, his form wavered, then dematerialized into nothing, and he was gone.
Derek opened his hand. There in his palm, as anyone would have known it would be, was the silver and topaz ring, illuminated in a swelling golden glow.
Derek, tears in his eyes, turned around. The light was much brighter, redder now. The Raven was on fire, blazing, just the same as it had been years ago, the night it had been torched, the night he had been trapped inside. The night that Derek had died.
He knew that now, after this, he would be with Jono again soon. At least he hoped so. It had to be. Had to.
He walked slowly toward the burning bar, all sparks and smoke, feeling the waves of heat. His body began to smolder. The Raven collapsed inward, like an unreliable memory.
A passing motorist on the Interstate thought for a moment he saw the shadowy shape of a man standing by what was left of what seemed to be a burnt-out ruin. Curious, he slowed down, but there was no one there.
He must have been mistaken.
AWAY IN A MANGER
Tom Mendicino
Whoever wrote that there’s no place like home for the holidays never had to travel more than a mile to reach the family hearth by Christmas morning. Year after year, I would make the annual pilgrimage to LaGuardia, watching the meter run while I sat in stalled traffic, shuffling through security and, finally, rushing to the gate, only to be slapped with the announcement of a three-hour delay. I could always count on United Airlines to lose my luggage or overbook the plane or seat me beside a screaming baby. Never again, I swore, after the year I missed my connection at National and had to pay a king’s ransom to upgrade to the only available seat on the last flight to Charleston, West Virginia.
So why not put the snappy little BMW 3-Series I kept in the city for summer weekend jaunts to good use? I would drive west through Jersey, dip south through Pennsylvania and Maryland, and be at my mother’s house on the far side of West Virginia for dinner.
The first two hundred miles flew by; I was making great time, way ahead of schedule. It was the easiest Christmas sojourn ever, and I was absolutely convinced it was the best idea I’d ever had, right up to the minute the engine died on Interstate 76, my punishment for ignoring the little red light reading MAINTENANCE REQUIRED that had been flashing on the dashboard since sometime after the Fourth of July.
And that’s how I found myself in the passenger seat of a tow truck, sitting beside a three-hundred-pound ogre whose right earlobe looked like it had been chewed by a starving pit bull. He was wearing a filthy Steelers jersey, size-sixteen boots and a bright orange hunter’s hat that provided some slight reassurance that the bloodstains on the floor had been left by small game and not human prey.
“This goddamn weather is a fucking bitch,” he growled as he squinted into the driving rain pounding against the windshield.
The exit ramp off the turnpike announced we were approaching Breezewood, Pennsylvania, the self-proclaimed Town of Motels.
“Guess I’m lucky, breaking down here instead of somewhere else,” I said, trying to force a little holiday cheer into the gloom.
“Why’s that?” he asked, fumbling in his shirt pocket for a pack of matches.
I figured it wouldn’t be wise to ask him not to smoke.
“Not much chance anyone is going to tell me there’s no room in the inn in the Town of Motels,” I said.
He gave me a blank look, no wattage in his eyes, as if he’d never heard the tale of the birth of the Christ Child.
“You know, like ‘Away in a manger, no crib for his bed,’” I said, fumbling, wishing I’d kept my damn mouth shut.
He scowled at my lame attempt at seasonal humor, his eyes narrowing into threatening slits, wary of being patronized by some suspiciously soft stranger driving a luxury car with a price tag higher than his annual salary.
“Where you from?” he asked in an accusing voice.
“West Virginia. Parkersburg. On the Ohio River. An hour north of Charleston,” I answered, not lying about my place of birth.
“How come you have New York plates?” he demanded, determined to make me confess.
“When can someone look at the car?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
“Not until day after tomorrow. No one works on Christmas Day,” he said, pulling a flask out of his pocket and, in the spirit of the season, offering me a nip. “So where you want me to drop you off?” I could see he was anxious to start celebrating the traditional redneck Christmas thirty-six-hour drinking marathon. I stared out the window at the phalanx of bright motel signs, each one promising cable TV, premium channels and free continental breakfasts. Quality Court. Quality Inn. Red Roof Inn. Holiday Inn. Travelodge.
“That one,” I said, pointing at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge up ahead to the right, seduced by happy memories of clam strips and peppermint stick ice cream, wistfully longing for a roadside America that had vanished thirty years ago.
He snorted when I wished him Merry Christmas as he pulled away, dragging my fickle vehicle behind him. The damp, vaguely chemical smell of the motel registration office quickly doused the flickering flame of HoJo nostalgia. The Bengali matron at the front desk was polite yet insistent, somehow managing to seem deferential as she rushed me through check-in. Her sari was the traditional orange of a Howard Johnson’s rooftop, but there was no sign of Simple Simon and the Pieman and no dining room or counter. She pointed me to a pair of vending machines when I asked where I could get something to eat. The selection on the Christmas menu was barbecue chips, Butterfingers and Diet Dr. Pepper.
“You don’t have a restaurant?” I asked. I felt cheated, scammed, the victim of an unconscionable fraud. This was supposed to be Howard Johnson’s! Where were the frankfurters grilled in butter, the macaroni and cheese?
“Restaurant over there. One-half mile,” she said, pointing toward the front window and a soaring neon sign, high enough to be seen from the turnpike ridge, announcing that KAY’S KOZY KORNER was the place in town to EAT.
The rain was still coming down hard as I trudged to my room, but the temperature was dropping rapidly. Winter was arriving just ahead of Santa Claus, and I cursed myself for having left my gloves and hat in the car.
It was almost seven o’clock when I called my mother to break the news that I wouldn’t be arriving for at least another day and a half. I complained about the shabby state of the hospitality industry, hoping for a little sympathy and maybe leniency for the unpardonable sin of having ruined her Christmas. It was obvious from the tone of her voice she wasn’t buying my story and suspected I was actually still in the 10022 zip code and on my way to some glamorous holiday party with my snooty New York friends.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I promised, unable to convince her that, under the current circumstances at least, there was no place in the world I wanted to be more than sitting down at her table for country ham and ninety-proof eggnog.
“It won’t be the same,” she said, hanging up to pull her pumpkin pie from the oven.
I was too wired to sleep so I showered and changed into dry clothes before venturing out on a scavenger hunt for something edible. The rain had changed to a driving snow that had already blanketed the streets and rooftops. The winter storm had transformed the Town of Motels into a department-store window Enchanted Village. It was easy to believe the inflatable Santas and Frostys and Rudolphs were animated by magic when their power cords were buried in snowdrifts. I took a short detour, making a pilgrimage to the illuminated crèche on the lawn of the First Lutheran Church. The town was perfectly still, the only sound the crunch of fresh snow under my feet. I shoved my freezing hands in my pockets and, through swirling gusts of snowflakes, headed toward the EAT Sign, quietly singing “Away in a Manger.”
The door flew open as I approached, and only my quick reflexes kept me from suffering a broken nose. The tow truck ogre stumbled out of the restaurant, fumbling with his keys, staring at me wild eyed, no glint of recognition on his face. I slipped past him, pitying anyone he encountered on the icy roads tonight, and stepped into a thick fog of cigarette smoke that enveloped me like a blanket. Christmas cheer was flowing from the beer taps. Holiday revelers, mugs in hand, already six sheets to the wind, were howling along to Springsteen’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” on the jukebox. It was a rough-looking crowd, weathered by hard work and hard drinking. The girls wore Santa caps and NFL gear, and there was nothing jolly about the men’s distended, swollen bellies. A fight broke out at the pool table, and a tray of bottles and glasses shattered on the floor before a fierce-looking dyke in a snowflake sweatshirt could hustle the pugilists out the door.
“Merry Christmas,” the boy behind the bar hollered. “What are you drinking?”
“Rye and a beer. Can I get a menu?” I shouted over the scalps of the drinkers hunkered down at the bar, arguing over the best way to eliminate the Muslim threat to their godly American way of life.
“You got a choice. Popcorn or pretzels,” he laughed, pointing at the baskets of bar snacks. “The cook called out sick. It’s on me,” he said, refusing my money as he handed me a shot of Crown Royal and a frosted mug of Bud Lite.
He bounced along the bar, cheerfully pouring booze, taking bills and handing back the change. He knew all the customers by name and smiled through the abuse that was heaped upon him when one of the regulars had to wait longer than twenty seconds for a drink. I was tired and hungry, and the whisky went straight to my head. I set down my empty mug, ready to call it an early night, when another round appeared on the bar. I waved my palm and shook my head, but he insisted I accept the drinks. I figured I should at least tip the kid for his generosity. He frowned and wagged his finger.
