by Blair Aaron
Out in the parking lot that night, he spoke to his girl for the first time. He got into his brand new truck, propped his feet up on the dashboard, and loaded chewing tobacco into his mouth.
In the darkness of that cold night, he heard a small petite voice from outside his window.
"What ya doin' there cowboy?"
Stetson looked over at her but didn't say anything.
"Why weren't you interested in getting that trophy. You deserved it and all."
He spit in his cup. "Hate crowds."
"Well I wanted to congratulate you on your big win. Don't you know who I am? We go to the same high school together."
"Nah."
But he was lying. Stetson knew the girl from thirteenth day of August of his freshman year. Lee Ann Finley was her name, and he'd loved her from the moment he'd laid eyes on her. To say Stetson loved someone wasn't an easy thing; his love wasn't something he gave quickly or cheaply. There were now only two people on earth he loved, his father and Lee Ann Finley.
"Well I know you. I know you don't think I'm the type to hang around here and all, but I've been wanting to meet you."
"I ain't your kind."
"Let me decide that for myself thank you very much," she said. She jumped in the cab of the truck, the point at which Stetson realized he'd forgotten to lock it. A little annoyed, but more than anything excited that his future fiancée was doing all the communicating for him, he could feel for a single second this alien warmth seep from the cracks in his heart; it was a feeling he'd long forgotten he was capable of.
"You know there's much more to me than just being a cheerleader." Stetson kept his gaze ahead of him, refusing to lock eyes with her.
"Let's see. I like sewing. I like making pizza for my little cousins. One of them, Drew, he's the funniest. He hates sausage so I always try to hide a little piece in each slice he gets, because he's so funny when he's mad."
Stetson continued staring ahead of him.
"This one time, I put one of those little plastic babies Cajuns use in a birthday cake. I put it in Drew's slice and he bit the head off. He started screaming and told everyone he ate the skeleton of a rat or mole." At this point, Lee Ann was laughing in between each word.
Stetson spit in his cup, silent the whole time.
"Well I thought it was funny." She calmed down a bit and looked around the now near-empty parking lot. "You know, it's very cold out here. Who are you waiting for?"
He didn't answer.
"I mean, you can't be living in your car or anything. What gives? Is it another girl? I'm going to be so angry if it is. You're mine, dammit." She waited for an answer.
Stetson turned in her direction and looked her in the eye.
"Is that right?"
—
That was fifteen years ago, when both he and Lee Ann were 17. Stetson was now 33 and many things had happened. His only parent had passed away from lung cancer, and he would be all alone in the world, if it wasn't for Lee Ann. She herself had plenty of family. Her dad and grandfather owned a car lot next to that same parking lot where they'd met all those years ago; in fact, that's how Lee Ann got her first Volkswagen Beetle. She even put fake eye lashes on the headlights, which impressed all her preppy friends at school.
Lee Ann had this friend named Brock around lately, whom she said she met through her sister's bridal shower. Given that he tried as much as possible to stay away from people when he could manage it, he forced himself to let her go long enough to hang out with her high school friends. He loved the girl and figured he could trust her, even though he didn't trust Brock. In fact, with every greeting Brock gave Stetson, he wanted to beat the shit out of him with every passing second. Never before had he wanted to hurt someone so much; but he nevertheless tolerated the guy because was curiously close to Stetson's woman.
"Hey babe. You're early." Lee Ann seemed a little surprised and scared that Stetson had come to pick her up at 2 PM instead of 7 PM, when she'd told him she would be off. For the past few years, Lee Ann had been working as a waitress at this pizza parlour in order to appease her father, who kept reminded her that times had changes, and it was important for a young woman to have some skills in the workplace. So being a pizza server was the compromise they'd made.
"Why not leave early?"
"Because Babe I wanted to see a movie with Stephanie and Brock."
"No. Let's go."
"I guess we'll just see him later this weekend at the cabin."
"Yep." Stetson spit in his dip cup.
"God that's gross. Honey you're really going to have to quit that soon. It causes cancer."
"We all gotta go sometime."
"Ugh, let me get my things." She walked back into the kitchen, leaving him standing in the middle of a busy restaurant, awkward as ever. Stetson noticed a 19-year old girl walk past him, who was wearing a short mini skirt that just barely revealed her butt cheeks. His brain immediately sent a spark of life to his penis, which immediately began growing in his underwear. He thought of his fiancée and what he planned to do to her that night under the covers—well, really every night over the next weekend.
And indeed he did fuck her brains out that night. She stepped out of the bathroom in a black lingerie piece. "It's new. Do you like it?"
"You ain't going to be wearing it long, girlie."
"Oh you are such a horndog," she said, laughing as just jumped onto the bed and straddled him. He ran his massive hands along her soft legs. The piece she'd bought was a little silk dress with white lacing along the edge. He flipped up the material to reveal her bare pussy and he instantly got a hard-on. She reached down from behind her and stroked his cock through his Wrangler jeans.
"Let's get you out of these clothes, cowboy."
He rolled off the bed and pulled off his jeans and underwear at the same time, revealing his 9-inch member dangling like a hungry dragon over his equally massive balls. Stetson was never the athletic type, but his body was built like a brick-shit house. Lee Ann commented all the time on how well he measured up to the other guys she'd slept with in high school, especially the football players.
"Come here big boy," she said, as she pulled her dress over her head to reveal her naked body. Stetson practically tackled her, and she let out a passionate sigh as he did it. He wrapped her legs around him and began cupping her soft nipples in his mouth. She moaned. He then blew softly along her navel and caressed her supple waist. He then tasted her thighs while making eye contact as she looked down at him. He started licking her pink folds; he could see the anticipation in her eyes.
He rolled over on his back and began stroking his cock. She crawled around and started rubbing her petite hands along his hairless body. His skin was a warm pink with fleshy yellow overtones, utterly perfect, despite his job as a construction worker. He did have callouses on his hands from bending wire and hammering sheetrock 70 hours a week. The moments he had with Lee Ann were growing more sparse, and Stetson could feel that strange loneliness which had consumed him during his teen years enveloping him again. His time with Lee Ann, however brief, was something which brought relief from that feeling.
She crawled on top of him and he slid his cock into her. She rode him cowgirl style, pushing her body up and down in a rhythmic motion by placing her hands on his chest to brace herself. Her brown hair dangled over his face, tickling the bridge of his nose, and he could smell the scent of her expensive shampoo she always bought. One thing about Lee Ann was that her scents always changed.
She moaned as he rubbed the tip of his cock along the walls of her canal. He put his finger over her clit and began massaging her button as she rode him faster and faster.
"Oh God," she said as they came together.
III
The Nash-Gibson gang haunted Baggs, Wyoming because its members believed that they had a right through posterity to running the town. The lead member of the gang had a history with the Klu Klux Klan and was outraged through the Civil Rights Movement that the “niggers had
the gall to disobey the whites.” Maddox had told Carter about them once, because he knew the lead member, Jaidon Marsh. Jaidon and Maddox went to high school together, and the two had befriended each other briefly before Maddox had matured. Originally, maybe because he had been essentially raised by wolves, Maddox had absorbed the white hot hate which radiated down on him since childhood; it was an indiscriminate hate to all things foreign or strange, born of ignorance and fear. Maddox and Jaidon got along initially because they both claimed, “All faggots should burn at the stake.” But gays weren't just the target; blacks, freaks, the dumb and disabled all were rounded into the same unacceptable, undesirable group of people. Maddox matured because he came to terms with his own homosexuality around the age of 17. It was the sole part of him that was not exactly the same as the people he'd been surrounded with since childhood. Like them, he was good at sports, hypermasculine, interested from an early age in machines and guns, extremely competitive, and honestly unable to relate to anyone who wasn't like him. This quirk, then, of his nature sent him through a kind of metamorphosis in his identity, because prior attempts to disavow himself of being gay just didn't do anything but make things worse. Jaidon, on the other hand, was pure bred country—and full of hate for everyone who wasn't. Jaidon and Maddox stopped speaking two weeks after high school graduation.
The screams Carter heard just ten feet from the metal building where he and Maddox were fucking was the sound of a woman being punched. Jaidon Marsh was the culprit.
Maddox jumped up instinctively. “What was that?”
“Hurry, put on your clothes before they turn on the lights. These doors don't lock,” Carter said. Both boys put on their pants and shoes and shirts just as they heard another scream from the same lady.
“What's going on? This doesn't happen in other places,” Carter said to Maddox.
“Yeah well not every place has the hicks and bozos you find here in Baggs. Let's go check it out. I have a feeling I know who it is.”
“Who?”
“That damn Jaidon Marsh. He's been riling up the square this past week with the Klan. They're all trying to get control of the county seat, control the judges, and hire all the right district attorneys.”
“Does he know you?”
“We used to be best friends in high school.”
“Maddox you can't be serious. You and that guy were friends? Does he know about you?”
“Hell no. Nobody does. He thinks I'm just like him. He's kind of an idiot.” Maddox finished tying his shoes and stepped out onto the hay, leaving Carter in the darkness of the metal closet. Carter followed after him after just a second, with a sinking feeling in his stomach. He couldn't figure out what made him so uneasy about the situation; he felt as if there were an alien electricity in the air, the way cats and birds might feel before an earthquake or electromagnetic storm. It was an incredibly unsettling feeling as he watched the love of his life disappear into the crowd of people. He was moving so fast and far away from Carter, and with every added foot he moved away from him, Carter could feel his ties with Maddox slipping away by proportion.
He followed Maddox into the crowd, which had formed a circle around a black haired guy with evil green eyes yelling and screaming right in the face of a middle-aged woman. The woman held her hand to her face.
“Do you think we want your kind around, nigger lover?”
She wouldn't look at him.
“You better answer me when I'm talking to you bitch. Did you hear what I said?” Jaidon spit a little on the woman in his anger. “Where's your nigger now? He gonna protect you?”
People stood around in a circle like blank animals in the brightness of sunlight, stunned into a frozen state as spectators of the scene. The group said nothing to keep Jaidon from backslapping the woman again. This time, she fell to her knees.
“Bitch I'll break your face open if you don't answer me.”
“Please stop. Leave me alone,” she said, trembling as tears ran down her face.
“Never bitch. If I had my way you'd be in jail for the shit you've done. Tell me, now! Where's your nigger?”
“I don't know.”
“You're lying. I'm giving you one last chance. Tell me now or you're sleeping in the ditch tonight bitch.” Jaidon pulled his hand out of his pocket, brandishing a shiny piece of metal.
“Now!” he screamed.
“Dear God don't,” she cried as Jaidon raised the knife into the air, ready to stab her in the heart.
“Put it down,” a voice said from the crowd.
Jaidon turned around in the direction of the voice. Maddox stepped out onto the open area. “In my book, having a knife against a woman makes you chicken shit. Put it down.”
“Well if it isn't the old buddy. How are ya buddy?”
“Put the knife down.”
“Why don't you make me, buddy?”
“Someone call the cops,” a man yelled from the crowd, which had grown three times as large. The noise had dimmed to a quiet so severe you could hear the crickets chirp.
“Say where ya been in the past few weeks. I reckon you hate this bitch as much as I do. Why don't ya help me finish her off?” Jaidon's eyes glowed with hate. He stepped toward Maddox, his knife flashing a glint of light across the crowd. He came within inches of Maddox and poked him in the chest with his finger.
“Don't you remember me?” Jaidon said, as he threw his fist across Maddox's jaw.
Carter, who had been watching from the sidelines with stones in his stomach, stepped forward. “That's not fair! Back off fucker!”
Jaidon turned around to zero in on Carter like an eagle for his prey. “Do you know who you're talking to buddy? I could take your skinny ass in a heartbeat. Are you his friend? You two butt fuck buddies?”
Carter didn't back down when he saw Jaidon come within two inches of his neck with a knife. Somewhere in the recesses of his unconscious, Carter could sense that his life was on the verge of being completely different than it ever had been. He was a billiard ball rolling toward the edge of the pool table, about to bounce right off in an entirely new direction. He swallowed hard.
“Or,” Jaidon smiled, “are you lovers?”
“Just friends, that watch each others' backs.”
“Let's test it and see, then,” Jaidon said as he thumped Carter across his nose. Carter didn't flinch, but as Jaidon raised his fist to punch Carter again, he was pulled back from behind by Maddox. Maddox straddled him and wailaid his face in a quick succession of punches. Maddox wrapped his hands around the guy's neck to choke him off. In his eyes, Carter could see the defensive and possessiveness Maddox had for him. Maddox would protect him at the cost of his life.
The angry expression Maddox changed all of a sudden into a curious look of surprise. He looked down at the switchblade sticking out of his sternum.
“No!” Carter screamed and ran over to Maddox. Right as he reached Maddox, the cops pulled Jaidon away. “I got him. I told you I'd get him.”
Carter knew this would end badly, as the sinking feeling he'd been enduring became all encompassing. He watched as Maddox Stern, the love of his life, died right in his arms that day.
IV
When Lee Ann asked Stetson about bringing along Brock for the ride, he was almost too shocked to be mad. This was the annual trip he and his girlfriend went on in order to have endless amounts of sex, free from the prying ears of neighbouring apartments and interruptive habits of her friends' cell phones. There was nothing between Brock and Lee Ann, she promised Stetson several times over the few weeks leading up to the trip. It was just that Brock needed some space from his girlfriend, and Lee Ann was the only person he was close to that he could trust. So Stetson agreed on two conditions—Brock must not come alone and he must sleep on the other end of the cabin, with whomever he brought with him. There was nothing Stetson hated more than having his privacy breached by another person without his permission, and the thought of that little prick Brock listening to his muddled grunts dur
ing orgasm made Stetson irrational with anger.
“Look,” Brock said, taking the rifle out of Stetson's hands, “you've got to shoot like this. Put your trigger finger on the side of the carriage until you're ready to shoot. Like this, see?”
They were deer hunting, sitting in the cold wooden cabin tied to a tree, watching a deer meander through the forest. Lee Ann came along, because she had no one else to hang out with. Plus, perhaps unsurprisingly, Brock's date had back out at the last minute.
Brock pulled the trigger, and the deer ran off under the wooden explosion caused by his richoeted bullet. Stetson jerked the rifle out of his hand, without saying what he really wanted to say, which was, “Listen you little piss ant. What I'd like to do with this rifle is blow your fucking brains out.”
“Yeah man it was the wind. I know it was.”
“Yeah sure it was,” Stetson said. He adjusted his cowboy hat, letting the cold mountain air run across his thick brown hair. “Move aside.”
“OK man, let's see if you can do any better,” Brock said.
They waited for several minutes as a deer miraculously came into a clearing. Stetson raised his rifle, turned off the scope, and sat there.
“Take the shot now man,” Brock said. “Take it.”
Stetson stared through the window at the deer. The deer moved behind a clearing and in between two trees, obscuring most of its body.
Stetson looked over at Brock to give him a warning.
“Boy you've got one chance to keep your hole shut or the next thing I'm gonna shoot after this here deer is your dumb ass.”
Brock wouldn't meet Stetson's gaze. “Yes sir.”
Stetson looked one moment out the window and pulled the trigger. The deer feel instantly.
“Hot damn,” Lee Ann said.
Brock chuckled. “Was a fluke.”
—
They were driving back in the blue pickup on the way back to the cabin in silence. Brock was intimidated by Stetson and he showed it. But what's more is that Brock clearly wanted to impress Lee Ann, and Stetson was in the way of that. Stetson couldn't ignore anymore what he'd known to be true. Brock wasn't just a friend to Lee Ann—maybe she truly thought that, innocent as she was—but he wanted in her pants. Maybe he was playing the long con and hoped Lee Ann would see something in him that she had missed before. Maybe he was competing with Stetson today when they were hunting. The bottom line, though, is that Stetson trusted Lee Ann with his life; she had earned that trust through years and years of constant and subtle tests Stetson gave her—in the way she treated his father on his deathbed, how she warmed up to Stetson's German sheperd. He loved Lee Ann, and Lee Ann loved him. That much he was sure of. As he pulled up into the gravel driveway of their weekend cabin, he decided to let his love for his girlfriend diffuse the anger and rage he had for Brock once again. He just let it go.
