by Paul Monette
He held Sam’s hips in his hands and sucked him up and down. It was as good a place to start as any, and it held him off from too much tight embracing, which made Sam nervous and shook him off. Also, he could be fairly certain for the time being that he wouldn’t say the wrong thing, and now, at the first touch, he always fell into his most unguarded moment. If it had gone another way and he’d sucked Sam’s ear, something he delighted in, he might have whispered, while Sam squirmed, the very antidote to his detachment. He knew Sam so well already that his cock seemed to have a taste all its own, which it didn’t, but as it was in his mouth that Nick made the connection, taste was a way of thinking about it. Actually the texture and the shape had more to do with it, Nick thought as he worked it, since a cock was rumored to be just as telling as a thumbprint. What was he going to do about the paradox: four years of UCLA, no grade below eighty-five, and then two years at Stanford learning how to overdevelop the third world, and still he could spend an hour meditating the contours of a hustler’s cock. Perhaps he shook his head in some dismay, just to think of it, and Sam groaned a little when the rhythm hit him at the root.
The truth was, the moral paradox didn’t interest Nick, and it didn’t give him sleepless nights that he had such a fix on sex. Ten years ago—when he blotted out the thought of sex in all its incarnations, and his own cock coiled in his pants and wouldn’t sleep, for all his rising above it—his A’s and his degrees were all well and good, but he tossed on his bed all night and clutched his fevered pillow. He went around walking on eggshells, trying to find the nice girl life was preparing for him, and the moral edge he felt had a way of cutting like a blade of grass or a sheet of paper. It was quite another paradox that kept him haunted: Why, in the middle of making love, had his mind started to race? If it wasn’t cowboys and gym gear, it was a stream of unspoken comments on the act itself as he played it out. It was true what he said to Rita, that he loved to fuck, but lately his fantasies fed on a thousand men before he came. So he didn’t go wild imagining Sam when they were together. That went on all the rest of the time.
“What was funny,” Sam said gently, reaching to clutch at Nick’s hair with his hands and talking easily, as if his lower body weren’t riding in heat, “the car turned out to be loaded with dope. One day a Baggie dropped out from under the dashboard. I dug out a couple of pounds, all tied up in ounces”—he rattled off the story as if it weren’t supposed to make sense, as if it were the tune and not the words he was voicing—“in the spare, in the tool kit, under the seats. Why would anybody smuggle grass to LA? I mean, no wonder the guy got lost.”
Nick lifted his head and sat back. All the while he was getting excited himself, but made no move to his belt or his boots. Sam’s eyes widened a fraction, as if he were about to take his turn and had ideas he’d only just thought of. Nick wondered where it came from, his endlessly renewed enthusiasm for another round. Sam went into detail readily about the high points of his career, and he gave indications of the sheer amount of work. But if he made you believe it was a job with special limits, like professional ball, the most confining having to do with what can be done with the time between games, he was all the more remarkable for his energy in the stretch.
“What do you want?” Sam asked, very civilized, as if he had swords laid out on a cushion.
“I don’t know. I’m just an old dog without a bone.”
“Is that right? You look like you couldn’t unzip your fly because of the pressure. I want to do it on the floor.”
It was a frivolous idea, sprung from his annoyance at the narrow bed—narrow as a grave, Sam had said, and it proved to him that cowboys didn’t do it—a free-float longing for novelty. While Nick undid his pants, still kneeling on the bed, Sam drained the beer and flung the can in the deep stone fireplace, where it clattered and ricocheted. Then he slid off the bed and scrabbled, hands and knees, to the middle of the floor, where he rolled over on his back in the dust. His pants were down around his boots, but he kept his clothes on. He seemed to want to get them dirty. Nick would have gone naked if he’d had the choice, but the situation called for mirror images. He stood above Sam and released his own cock at last, which stood out straight and swayed a little. Then he came down on top of Sam, sixty-nine, and they mouthed each other like divers breathing out of hoses down among the reefs. They went over on one side, then on the other, and reached the point where it was all technique, no room for who they were to each other.
Sam heard it first, like a film threading through a projector, and he felt a rush of lust at the thought of him and Nick cavorting on camera. They were lying half on the bare floorboards, half on the hearthstone, a single slab greasy with soot and the sputtering of meat. In the fireplace, andirons strong as truck axles held up a couple of half-burned logs. From a long hook at one side hung a cast-iron pot. Someone had taken the ashes away and swept. The snake was curled beneath the logs, the rattled tail in plain sight, about a foot and a half from Sam’s head.
Nick knew right away, and he spit Sam out and gasped, as if he had to come up for air. Then froze. Sam might have figured it out too late if the change in Nick hadn’t hit him. He had to freeze, too, right away. Because the rattlesnake was moving. But when it did hit him what it was, he was horror-struck and went into a sort of spasm. Nick was still holding him around. He clamped Sam closer, and it seemed to still the shaking like a tourniquet. Buried as they were between each other’s thighs, they were blind. They could only follow it by the rattle, and then, as it glided toward Sam, by the sandpaper sound it made on the fireplace floor.
It was as if the snake knew he had the upper hand, because he got out of the fireplace and, staying close to Sam, passed along the whole length of his body in a slow sleepwalk. He mulled the killing over. The noise that snapped him awake under the logs and filled his cheeks with vengeance on his enemies had ceased. He did a turn at Sam’s feet and readied for a strike, but he didn’t deign to make the first move. Let the beast breathing hard on the floor move a muscle, though, and he’d spring, mouth gaping, into the nearest swell of flesh, the calf or the buttock.
In an instant, the sweat began to pour out of Nick and Sam. Between their torsos, hearts knocking hard to be let out and flee, the sweat had them boiling with the heat until they thought they would suffocate. The rattle came now like a drummer biding time with a light, long roll. Nothing happened. Any other time, Nick and Sam could have fallen off to sleep in that position, but now the need to hold still even a minute longer made them shudder and cramp and beg to run. It was only twenty seconds, thirty at most, since they’d first noticed something wrong, when the snake cocked the trigger and got them covered. But already they were like two men on a tiny lifeboat who don’t trust one another with the tiller or the gun. Nick took over, and he cradled Sam in his arms while he tried to figure out what to do when the worst happened. Sam was more scared, and not just because he was closer to the snake. It was a death tied to a nightmare. Unable to even look it in the face, forced to take it in the back, he seemed to be delirious with fever, toxic, as if the venom already bubbled in his blood. And he didn’t turn to Nick. Though Nick held on and would have let him know it was happening to both of them—at least that—Sam didn’t believe in anyone. There was no safety in numbers.
“Can’t you do something?” he whispered.
“I am.” They might have been talking through a two-way radio. The sound was barely audible, but not the pitch of feeling and the tone of voice. “From here on, Sam, it’s all luck.”
“What’s it going to do?”
“It’ll go away. Don’t move,” Nick said. He didn’t believe the one thing and sent the other up as a plea to all of them. Don’t move, something kept saying very clearly in his head, and he meant the two of them and the snake, but a part of him meant the whole world, too.
The rattle’s last effect was out of snake lore Nick had known all his life, though he’d had no occasion to recall it in the years since he learned it at school. So thi
s is what it means, Nick thought, about the trance. As if a pocket watch were swinging back and forth, they were mesmerized. The sound was so insistent it seemed to set up a baffle in the brain, cutting the fear off, and it carried power like a current. The spell, Nick remembered, was a stroke of suspended time before the attack, so he knew when he gave himself over to it that one of them was marked. But he felt the same unwinding in Sam when he relaxed his arms. For the space of the snake’s seduction, they seemed to have left sixty-nine behind them and gone into a kind of yoga. Now, Nick thought, feeling nothing, do it now while we are numb enough. Not desiring it exactly, but accepting what would be required of him next. Maybe it was easier for him, because Sam was the target, after all. Nick just the medicine man.
But their luck held. The snake must have gotten the lore all wrong, because he kept up the rattle and made no move. It’s not like drowning, Nick thought, since his whole past life slipped his mind. He and Sam were losing heat, and where their bodies touched, it was cool. There wasn’t a thing they had to do. And when at last the snake slid across the room to the open door, Nick felt the world returning with a pang. Can it be I regret it, he wondered. The snake went away as if it couldn’t be bothered. There were other shady places to hide in. As if a strike, to be worth it, had to meet with an outsize target, like a rearing mustang or a climber on a cliff face grabbing a blind ledge and coming down on the rattle. So they were safe. But as it vanished, as the tip of the tail disappeared, Nick felt something like fangs go in above his heart. The whole thing said: A snake isn’t what you think it is.
Then the pressure fell. The plug got pulled out of the balloon, and the room sighed down to human size again. Nick and Sam fell over on their backs, head to crotch, and seemed to wait for ordinary life to come around, so they could jump on. They didn’t see how ordinary it was again already. They hadn’t seen the snake, either. It wasn’t so much the feeling that it hadn’t happened; it was as if something else had happened—a fight about nothing or a bad time in bed. Neither of them understood what had so suddenly isolated them. Each felt, perhaps, that he would have gotten over the rattlesnake fast if he’d been alone in the bunkhouse. Someone else being there meant someone else knew how insignificant the people had been. If someone had been bitten, they would have surfaced in the drama in the time-honored way, victim and rescuer, Nick making slits in Sam’s thigh and sucking out the poison. As it was, the vast indifference of the Wild West was all they had to take their measure by. And they came out microscopic.
“Are you all right?”
“I want to go home,” Sam said, but as if he didn’t have the strength to go. He made it something of an accusation. Kidnapped and sold into white slavery, right off the curb where he hung out on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Nick sat up and looked him in the face. His color was awful. “Whatever you want,” Nick said, and when he put out his hand and let it rest on Sam’s chest, he felt Sam flinch. “I won’t bite you. Unless you want to be alone, why don’t you come back to Bel-Air?” No response. “We’ll have lunch,” he added, inanely enough, but he meant to make it clear that the real world lay in routine. I won’t touch you, Nick might have promised, except he left it open in case Sam wanted it. Purely academic of him. They’d both shrunk up as if they’d just had a swim in a mountain lake.
“What would have happened?” Sam demanded suddenly. “What would we have done?” He wanted to know how Nick would have gotten them out of it if the snake had struck. He was having a little fire drill here. Shutting the barn door after the horse was loose.
“But it didn’t happen,” Nick said sensibly. Not an attitude designed to cure hysteria. He might as well have admitted they were helpless. They would have done what they could, but it would have been a nightmare. Yet Nick resisted it. He strove to be matter-of-fact with Sam. Since the moment had passed him by to be tested by nightmares, he aimed to be as tough as he could in the letdown.
So he got them moving as if the only thing on his mind was getting them home in time for lunch. He stood and hiked his pants to his waist again, then reached for his shirt on the rocking chair and put it on. Sam was sitting up now, his arms around his knees and his head in his arms. Nick weighed the issue of going back to LA in one car and retrieving the MG another day. But that would leave Sam stranded for the intervening time, so was it all right to ride in caravan? Nick asked him solicitously. Could he drive? Of course he could. Put that way, as if Sam needed special handling, it dared him to be the weaker of the two. He got up and zipped himself and strode out the door to the porch. Sullen as hell but self-contained. The accusation phase had ended, but his mood was still tricky, as though the slightest thing would have had him all over Nick with his fists. No need, he said, for them to ride bumper to bumper. He knew the way to Bel-Air. Let them just meet when they got there. Well see, the implication was, who gets there first. Nick told him how to find Crook House up in the hills, the last leg of the journey, and then they split up, each to his own car, like racing men in shiny silver jackets. The other five beers were on the bed still, getting warm.
Because the Mercedes was parked further away, Sam seemed to wait, motor idling, until Nick was ready. Nick pulled alongside the MG as if there were a starting line drawn in the dust.
“Maybe you ought to tell the man at the gate about the snake,” Sam said.
“What man at the gate?”
“Someone’s there painting a sign.”
“Oh.” The sign that said “SOLD.” Nick almost forgot that his bid had been accepted and this was all his. He’d clinched it at an early breakfast with the agent, at Schwab’s on Sunset. Because they were both in real estate, they talked about the ranch as if no land went with it. It had to do with making an investment. Nick didn’t talk cowboys at Schwab’s.
“I’ll check it out,” he said.
As Nick pulled onto the road and led the way up the hill, he remembered that he’d planned all morning to tell Sam he’d bought the ranch. Now he planned not to. He looked in the rearview mirror at the MG. You’re only as good as your last trick, Sam had said to him the day they met, untroubled about whether or not he was being original. It’s too much the truth, Nick thought now, not to be the motto of all good whores or gamblers. Poor Sam. Today’s trick was such a bucket of ice water that it might have been arranged by the Puritan God who lived in more seasonal fields than Southern California. Nick had a picture of the run of seamy endings Sam must have gone through—coupling interrupted by who knew what vigilantes, the wives and the toilet police. People didn’t pay what they owed after they got what they bought. People got depressed, or they took out knives or locked themselves in the bathroom. Having survived it, Nick thought, Sam had earned a better deal. He wanted to make up for the snake, and a hundred ways sprang to his mind. Still, he wasn’t going to say he bought the ranch.
The Mercedes took the lift over the hill without a bump, but he was going a little too fast to feel nothing at all. He had a moment when he went weightless, and it drew his eyes out of the mirror and back to the dusty, rutted road. At the gate, about a half-mile down the long hill, he saw a pickup truck parked broadside to him. He knew it right away, before he could even see the shop’s name on the door, tan on gray: Peter’s. Peter himself, standing a little way off in the fields, painting the sign, might have been anyone, might have been the cowboy who had eluded Nick and Sam all morning. After the snake, Peter wasn’t the least bit extraordinary. He seemed to have work to do there, a little way off the road, and his light hair was blown about so that one would never know he had it barbered in Beverly Hills. If he was lettering a sign, it didn’t spell anything yet. It was just colors. But no doubt it would say what it meant. Was Peter like the cowboy in his dreams, Nick thought as he narrowed his eyes, wondering how it could be that Peter looked as if he’d lived here all along.
Peter—because he was dazzling when he dressed to kill, because he was as serene as a yachting sailor when he went out for cocktails or walked into an opening—
was too crown-prince for the Wild West. Peter walked through the weather of LA as if it were a shelf of olive trees above Cannes. But here he was. Nick was so spellbound by him, the figure in the miles of desert space, that he didn’t stop to imagine how Peter got here, and why now. And he didn’t think of Sam from the time he saw the truck till, cruising down the hill with the crunch in his ears of the tires on gravel, he braked forty feet from the gate.
Peter heard a noise like runaway horses. He turned and saw Nick and Sam when they were too close for him to think about. He walked back toward the road, and Nick only needed to roll his window down as he came to a stop. When he looked up, Peter’s face was a foot away.
“I didn’t think you’d come till later,” Peter said, putting out his hands to lean against the roofline of the car. When he ducked his head forward, the usual world, about ten cubic feet, righted itself between them, deaf to everything but the truth. “I was all ready for four o’clock,” he went on. “You would have found me sitting on the gate with a piece of grass in my mouth. But I was just guessing when you liked to come here. And I didn’t dare go that way without you.” He pointed up the hill and into the land without turning his head.
“How did you get here?” Nick asked wonderingly, beginning to see how odd it was. As if fate had dropped Peter in the path in much the same way as it had unrolled the snake.
“You mean, how did I find you?” he said with a smile. They couldn’t ignore the MG much longer, but they could as long as they spoke in shorthand. “Your office told me. They even sent a map over to the shop.”
“Is this the day you want to see the place?” Nick asked. Although he was asking out of it for now, he was still shot through with gratitude to have Peter here at last. And doubled up with guilt not to be staying on all day. “I would have planned it.”
