Lance

by Ronald L Donaghe

  “Can’t you give him just five minutes?” Uncle Sean asked.

  “To do what?” the cop persisted. “You ain’t family or his attorney, what good’s it going to do?”

  But Uncle Sean wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer. “They’re friends, man. The kid in there’s a minor, probably scared out of his mind. At least let him see one friendly face.”

  The cop turned away and pushed a button on the console behind him. “Just him,” he said, cocking his head at me. “Five minutes, and you be outta there. Otherwise I get in trouble.”

  So a minute later, I was sitting in a chair on the other side of the cell. Casey was crying his eyes out. He looked as bad as the morning he showed up at school, with his face a bloody mess, again, and he looked as small as I’d ever seen him, as if he’d shrunk six inches, looking more like a kid than a seventeen year old. He was wearing an orange jumper and paper shoes, and it was cold as hell, and he kept shivering as he sat in his chair on the other side. When he put his hands on the bars, I folded mine around them, feeling how cold his fingers were. I could feel him shaking through his hands, and I knew he was scared and cold and probably in for it.

  “It’s my fault, Casey. If I hadn’t said that to Rick. You were right. We shouldn’t have come looking for you there in Cotton City. I knew you weren’t supposed to be seeing me and Lance. I’m sorry.”

  “It ain’t your goddamned fault, Will. You spoke true, what you said.” Casey’s lips were so bruised and puffy it sounded like he’d said, “You smoked roo,” which almost made me start crying again, only I didn’t want Casey to see it.

  “What happened?”

  Casey wiped tears off his face, wincing at the pain. “I couldn’t take it any more! Wickactin all hut, n’he’s the one went’n told.” Snot came out of Casey’s nose, hanging off his upper lip, his eyes bloodshot, and one of them swollen shut.

  “You seen a lawyer yet?”

  He shook his head. “Not ‘till Monday.” He wiped the snot away with his sleeve, streaking his face. It glistened under the light.

  “What’s your mother saying? Or Stephen? Anybody on your side?”

  “I don’t know, Will. Somebody called the cops, and I was taken away. Mom was crying, Stephen was crying. Family was coming in, once word got out.”

  There wasn’t anything I could do, I realized, not even now, except maybe tell them in court how his brothers had raped him and thrown him off the barn, like he was a ball to catch, how his father horse-whipped him, how Rick had beat him up.

  Only at that moment, with the wind howling past the small barred window high up in the cell, and Casey hanging onto the bars with my hands wrapped around his, and both of us looking at each other and crying, it all seemed pretty hopeless.

  “You want me to tell Dick anything?” I asked. “Does he know?”

  Casey shrugged. “Don’t know. Tell him, though.”

  “Anything else you want me to tell him?”

  He shook his head. “Naw.”

  So a minute later, I left, wishing I could hug him tight and feeling like a creep just turning my back on him and walking out, him still hanging onto the bars.

  Part Three

  Coming to an End

  Fourteen

  What it Meant to Graduate

  I graduated right on schedule in May of 1973. My graduating class consisted of thirty-nine students. For a small school, we have our share of local funding, and the ranchers of the county have formed a trust that provides scholarships to those whose academic achievements warrant recognition. That’s kind of taken out of the letter I received announcing I was being given a scholarship. I hadn’t expected it, until I remembered Mrs. Hendricks and Mrs. Blackmon had taken such an interest in me mid-freshman year when I wrote that essay about Daddy. And since that time, I had soared in writing and in the rest of my studies. I’ll never really know how I made it, though, with school, running the farm without Daddy, and handling the problems Lance and I had with a few people. So, when I had taken my last class and walked up on stage to receive my diploma, and then woke up the next day, I felt as light as a feather. I had nothing to do, not a single book to crack, not a single weed to chop or tractor to hitch a plow to. Nothing, that is, until we had to get the farm ready to sell to Old Man Hill. My next step was college—only I had decided to wait until Lance graduated, which meant I’d put off starting school until January 1974. That was all right with me, because I needed time to gather up the tools and equipment and get it ready for auction, and help Mama load up a lifetime of things she didn’t want to take with her when she moved. She either gave the stuff to the more needy families, sold it in yard sales, or I hauled it off to the dump.

  Then in December of 1973, Lance graduated, and the same trust fund provided a scholarship for him as well. But this one came through because of the efforts of his art teacher, Mr. Drummond.

  And there was the problem. His scholarship specifically named the Academy of Art College in San Francisco he was to attend, and if he didn’t, his scholarship would be given to someone else. I had applied to and been accepted by the University of Texas at Austin, since Austin is where Uncle Sean was now living, and he wanted Lance and me to come out there. Lance said he didn’t care about his scholarship. He wanted to move to Austin with me. I was torn, because I knew how talented he was, and I didn’t want him to have to give up art school. We both cried about our dilemma, we loved each other so much. So rather than being happy, now that we both had our high school diplomas and had our whole future ahead of us, we faced having to live separately for awhile. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t stand the thought of being without Lance for two years, which was the term of his scholarship. Thereafter, he was free to finish his bachelor’s anywhere he wanted.

  As we had been expecting, Mama sold the farm in July to Goddard Hill, and he gave us five-hundred dollars an acre, which he said was twice its value, and he gave us ten-thousand dollars for the house, barn, and well. We had auctioned off the old farm equipment and it had brought in a couple thousand more. So we would walk away with quite a bit more than Daddy had paid for the land thirty years before. Mama insisted on dividing up the money, because we were scattering to the four winds, though that wasn’t quite true. Only May was going to be left behind, here in this part of the country, though she did seem happy. Uncle Sean had found Mama a house there in the hill country of Texas, not too far from Austin, where she and Trinket and Rita were going to live.

  When Mama and Uncle Sean were talking about the house, I could hear the excitement in her voice. In fact, it was the lightest, happiest conversation she and Uncle Sean had had for a long time. When she got off the phone she was still beaming and told us the house Uncle Sean had found was a lot like the one he and Mama had grown up in there in Louisiana.

  “It’s a two-story with a steep roof. An attic bedroom for you,” she said to Trinket. “You can finally have your own place to spread all your stuff out in. Sean says it’s a fancy style with a wrap-around porch with pillars. There’s even a chandelier in the dining room.”

  I was glad for Mama and figured it would be a good place for her to grow old in. It also sat on nearly forty acres of hill country with trees, grass meadows, and even a creek running through it. So I was happy for my family.

  But all of us were leaving with a cloud over our heads. With Casey’s trial that came up in February of 1973, a whole lot of things came out, which embarrassed Mama, who sat beside Margie Collins day after day during the trial. Only it wasn’t really a trial with a jury, like you’d think, since Casey was a minor. It was just a couple of lawyers, the judge, and just about everybody who was anybody in Cotton City and folks from the rest of the county who came to gawk and whisper and hear the testimony.

  I have to hand it to Margie Collins. She didn’t take Rick’s side at all. Like Mama, she had knowledge you wouldn’t know she had, because she did keep some things to herself until the trial. And even when she was asked to tell what she knew about the fam
ily, she was reluctant to let it out. One bit of information that went in Casey’s favor was that Mr. Zumwalt was a wife beater and just about everybody in Cotton City knew that he abused his children. Even Stephen, Casey’s brother, who was just a year older than Casey, testified as to how his father had picked on Casey more than the rest of them.

  And when I got to speak, I told them about the first time I had seen Casey beat up, and how it was Rick and his father who had done it. But lawyers sure are cold fish. I was practically crying having to tell about it, but they hardly even blinked.

  The thing that might’ve swayed the judge in Casey’s favor was the doctor’s records, showing that Casey had a history of broken bones that had never been satisfactorily explained to the doctor. Just like the rest of the boys. So in the end, Casey was let go.

  But it didn’t really help him. He went down in school after the trial. He quit sports and never was the same. Kids were okay around him, but they shied away from him anyway, and he felt it, I guess. Since he was a year behind me, I only saw him in school for the last half of the spring semester of 1973. He never would do anything with me or Lance, and he and Dick went their separate ways as well.

  I had visited with Dick on the day I went to the jail to see Casey. At first, he seemed like he was okay with what had happened, and talked about him and Casey still being best buddies. What I didn’t hear from him or Casey was the word ‘love.’ And I figured what they had was just convenient sex, both of them experimenting, both of them trying to pretend for awhile that they were like me and Lance.

  Dick graduated with me, and the last I heard that summer was that he had headed for the coast in his pickup, with a few hundred bucks in his pocket and an urge to explore the gay world.

  Then Lance graduated in December of 1973, and like I said, we’d already sold the farm, so it was just a matter of what he and I were going to do about going to separate schools. I wanted him to make a fair decision, though I was about to die that he’d choose to go to that art school there in San Francisco.

  So on the day after Christmas of 1973, he and I took off up to the rocky ledge overlooking the Phelps-Dodge smelter plant where we had first met.

  It was a cold-as-ice kind of day, with the wind blowing from the west. Lance was looking really good. He’d taken to wearing a cowboy hat, and I had gotten him a sissy-colored lavender sweater with a rolled collar that hugged his body and showed off all his newly formed pecks and abs, and made me jealous that I couldn’t be the sweater. More beautiful than ever, with the sweater bringing out the violet in his eyes and complementing the tanned skin tones of his face, he sat down on the rocky ledge, hugging his knees. I sat down next to him, on the same side I had sat that day I first laid eyes on him, hugging my knees as well. I was wearing a hooded sweat shirt and over that I was wearing my letter jacket and a cap. Still it was cold, but I was shaking more from what we were trying to decide.

  We both looked out over the smelter plant, glinting brightly in the sun, both of us shivering with the hard cold of the desert wind moaning through the grease-wood on the rocky hill behind us.

  We were both wearing our rings. We had never taken them off, even when it meant showing up at school with them on. People had noticed, and some of the students had made cutting remarks, trying to embarrass us. By then, with all the razzing Lance and I had been through with Casey and Dick, and the trouble with Rick Zumwalt, and the trial, a few remarks just didn’t faze me or Lance. But even that seemed in the distant past, now that we had both graduated and, like I said, had our whole future ahead of us.

  “You going to tell your mother you’re leaving?” I asked, because it seemed appropriate, now that we were looking down on the smelter plant.

  “Hell the fuck no!” Lance said, frowning at me, and even now making me cringe with the force of his language. “Why’d you even ask that, Will? She’s dead, dead, dead, as far as I’m concerned!”

  “I just thought—”

  “Well don’t,” he said, cutting me off, hurting my feelings. “You’re my family, now.”

  We stared out over the rolling away hills and mountains to the west for a moment longer, then Lance got up. “This isn’t working, Angel. It’s too fucking cold!”

  He was angry, and it was just coming out, now. I tried to realize that he was trying to handle things, all sorts of things, like leaving without saying good-bye to his mother, but more importantly, coming to a decision if he was going to go to the school in San Francisco and us being separated for at least two years.

  I shivered again and stood up, too. I tried to wrap my arms around him and kiss him, but he turned his face away. “If you do that, Will, I won’t be able to make a rational decision.”

  Again, I felt my face sting with hurt, but it was silly. I knew it wasn’t me he was angry with but our situation.

  His classes at the art school started in two weeks, so if he decided to go, we had to get him packed and drive him out there. He’d already been accepted, since we had carried through with the application, regardless of whether he decided he would really go. The professors had written back after getting a look at his portfolio, practically begging him to come. And I knew they were right, and that the best decision for Lance would be to go.

  So we stood there, both shivering, looking at each other; me on the verge of tears, wanting to hold him, but knowing it would be all the more difficult for him to decide. We’d both agreed that we would have to make a decision today, and had agreed that we would come here and think it through. So far, however, we had only aggravated each other.

  I took his hand, which he let me hold, and led him back to the pickup. We got in and sat as far apart as we could. Although the wind was howling past ferociously, it was almost warm and cozy in the cab.

  “If I go,” Lance said, looking over at me with tears in his eyes, “you promise me you won’t go find yourself another husband?”

  I could hardly speak, because I knew he had made a decision. “Of course I won’t, Lance. I love you so much it hurts! And if you go, will you promise the same thing? You’re a knockout and, there in San Francisco, you’ll have guys hitting on you all the time. You’ll probably find someone who’s ten times better looking than this old farmer.”

  Lance snorted a laugh, which ended in a sob. “That’s impossible, Angel. And you’re no old farmer.”

  “Then you’ve decided?” I could feel a sob starting way down in my chest, and I took a deep breath trying to keep it from coming up.

  He nodded, looking over at me with tears beginning to spill out. “You think I’m good enough to be a real artist?”

  I nodded as well, fighting the sob welling up. “You are. You deserve this. I’ll be waiting for you, Lance. I’ll save up all my love milk and when we see each other I’ll fill you up.”

  “And I’ll do the same! I promise!”

  And with that decided, we just ripped our clothes off. It was like we’d already been apart for months, the way we went at it. When we were spent, the windows were steamed up, our lips were bleeding, our little buddies were raw, and the cab of the pickup smelled heavenly with the scent of our love making.

  Then Lance dared me to step out of the pickup, naked, into the cold wind. Which we did. We stood together overlooking the sweeping away of the land, down on the smelter plant, and Lance took my hand and we raised our arms.

  “Piss on you!” Lance screamed at the top of his lungs, and he started pissing into the wind.

  “Piss on you!” I screamed, about to laugh, feeling nutty as a fruitcake. But I knew what Lance was doing, and I let go with a stream of piss, as well. We were pissing on his parents and defying the world, and we were doing it together. Always together.

  The wind blew our water back on us, wetting our legs, leaving my skin feeling as if it had been hit with ice water.

  But we danced around naked for a minute or two until we were both about to freeze our peckers off and ran back to the pickup, hugging and laughing and crying.

&nb
sp; Fifteen

  The Separation

  According to the road atlas, it was just a little over a thousand miles from Hachita to San Francisco. Lance and I were going to take three days to get there. We’d already put off taking the trip as long as we could, but when there was only five days left before he had to be at the Academy of Art College for the beginning of classes, we knew we had to leave. So we loaded up the pickup the night before we left, and I covered everything with a tarpaulin. We joked about us looking like the Beverly Hillbillies, and I guess that’s exactly how I felt. I’ve never said much about the pickup, but Daddy always believed in buying the best, and he always thought that was Ford. It was a 1965 model with a v-8 engine and the standard four-speed transmission. He’d always taught me to change the oil and filter and plugs regularly and it had never given us a lick of trouble, but after almost nine years as a farm vehicle, it looked beat up and worn out. So on the day that we took off, I’d washed it (though it didn’t do much good), changed the oil and everything, checked the belts, the transmission fluid. I’d already bought a new set of tires. So we were ready by four the morning we left.

  Well, actually, we weren’t ready at all. But we were sticking to the decision we’d made out on the rock ledge a few days before. Even Mama was surprised at the decision, and so were Trinket and Rita, and Rita got me aside the night before when Lance was making sure he had everything packed.

  “I don’t know, Will. I don’t think I’d be able to do it. You guys’ll be almost two-thousand miles apart, and it won’t be easy to see each other for a long time. That’s halfway across the country.”

  I knew it, and even while she was telling me this, my heart was pounding and I had a sick feeling in my stomach.

  “And you know what they say about time and distance,” she continued. I knew she wasn’t trying to be mean, because there were tears in her eyes and fear, too. I think she loved Lance and didn’t want to see him lost to our family.