by Kyell Gold
What bothered him on the three-mile walk through the cooling air of evening was two things: one, that he hadn’t come up with better insults while he was there in the room with the smell of the tiger still in his nose, the feel of that cock on his tongue. And two, that flash of hope when the tiger’d stopped him on his way out. He hated that.
He hadn’t realized how much he’d thought Miski would be different because he was gay. Shit, the girls all talked about how sometimes a player would bring a couple of his friends around, how they’d have a party and trade partners, a real orgy type thing. All season Argonne had been thinking about how Miski might be less uptight than the guys he blew, how he might become a regular guy on the road, but someone who’d get a little conversation in addition to a load in his mouth. And then he’d gotten close only to have the door slammed in his face, almost literally. He hated it, and he hated that he hated it.
And he hated that he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He’d run into Delilah outside and they’d gone for coffee, the skinny panther buying for him. She was one of the few girls who felt sorry for him or maternal toward him, he couldn’t always tell the difference. She’d sucked off some bear who hadn’t said much; Argonne had barely listened to the story because it was the same as every other story, only the names and numbers changed. When she’d asked for his story, he’d just said, “Same old closet case, same old cock, same old come in my mouth.”
Delilah had laughed and reached across the table to pat his paw. “Don’t grow up too fast, honey,” she’d said. “You keep me young, you know.”
He couldn’t say why he wouldn’t tell her about Miski. It wasn’t that he’d promised, not really, or maybe it sort of was. But also it was that he was imagining her saying, “What, the gay guy threw you out?” He didn’t want to deal with that, not then and not now.
He’d planned to maybe get in with some of the parties going on around town to clear his mind. The girls had connections, after all, and there were sure to be some happy Sabretooths who needed blow jobs. But then his manager had called and asked if he’d be available to work Monday. “I know you’re off ‘til Wednesday, but there’s some kind of bug going around and nobody else is in.”
It was Kim and Khalil who were out, so Argonne knew they were “sick” with the football championship party flu. He could easily have said no, but found himself eager to be done with this city, this crowd, this trip. And Val was a good manager—she treated Argonne better than the assholes at the Jack In The Box and the Price-Rite. He’d begun to realize that a good manager was like a well-coordinated outfit: when you ran across one, you held on for as long as you could.
So here he was trudging through neighborhoods getting the stink eye from a couple lions and three rats lounging across the street. He skirted broken glass and stayed under street lights as best he could, hurried across crosswalks between cars (because the cars never stopped here in Crystal City), and kept the noise and smell of the highway to his right.
He found the Corsicker Boulevard on-ramp and installed himself there, leaning casually against a sign with his tail swinging free and his thumb pointed discreetly toward the highway whenever a police car wasn’t in sight. Cars zipped by him for twenty minutes before one stopped, a four-door sedan.
“Where you go?” the kinkajou asked through the passenger window.
Argonne leaned in. “Any travel center more’n an hour west.” The guy stared back at him blankly. He pointed down the highway. “West. One hour.”
The kinkajou shook his head. “Sorry.” And the car pulled away just like that.
Fifteen more minutes went by, and then an SUV ground slowly to a halt in front of him. The rear passenger side window rolled down, and a pudgy raccoon stuck his head out. “Are you a criminal?”
Argonne shook his head. “No.”
From inside the car, a high-pitched female voice. “Ask him where he’s going?”
“Where you going?” the raccoon dutifully repeated.
Argonne gave his destination again. “We’re going to Orange Creek,” the raccoon said. “That’s an hour and fifteen minutes.”
“Don’t tell him where we’re going!” the female voice shrieked. “Just tell him how far.”
“An hour and fifteen minutes,” the raccoon repeated.
“I’d really appreciate it if you could drop me off,” Argonne said.
“Tell him to get in,” called the female voice, and the locks clicked open. Argonne had his paw on the door handle and was pulling before the other raccoon could finish repeating his companion’s order.
The driver was an older female raccoon in a sleeveless dress that smelled of birds and tea. She stared suspiciously as Argonne got in and closed the door, and her glare didn’t lighten even when he turned on his most charming smile. He didn’t even twitch his nose, which was hard because the whole SUV smelled of birds; they must drive their pets around fairly often. “Thanks,” he said as he pulled the seatbelt across his chest. “I need to get back to Chevali for work in the morning.”
“Hah.” The old female raccoon pulled back out onto the road and turned onto the highway ramp. “Josh. Keep your gun out. If he tries anything, shoot him.”
“I’m not going to try anything.” Argonne reached into his pocket, and the old raccoon nearly swerved into the next lane.
“Hey! What’re you doing there?” she shrieked. “Don’t you pull a gun on me. Josh! Josh!”
Fortunately, Josh didn’t seem quite as excitable. He stuck his masked head forward between the seats. “I don’t really have a gun,” he said amiably. “That’s just something Ma says to scare people.”
“And it doesn’t work if you tell them,” his mother snapped. “If we get killed, this doesn’t count as a mitzvah.”
“It still counts. It’s better, if anything,” Josh said. “Then we’re like martyrs.”
“It doesn’t work that way!”
“It’s just my phone.” Argonne showed them. “I want to call my manager. That okay?”
“Sure,” Josh said.
So Argonne dialed Val, and even this late she picked up. “Hi,” he said. “So it looks like I’ll be able to get back for Monday morning.”
“Oh my God, thank you so much. I owe you. And you won’t be charged for the vacation days, of course, any of it. How much did it cost to change your plans?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s…it’s fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“All right. See you tomorrow at nine, then. Thanks again, Chris.”
He hung up and replaced the phone. “See?” he said to the mom.
“Anyway,” Josh said as his mother stared stonily ahead at the highway, “if you tell them I have a gun, then if they have a gun, the first thing they do is shoot me. And if they don’t have a gun, we don’t need to be worried.”
She didn’t answer. Argonne curled his tail over his knees and closed his eyes. “I don’t have a gun,” he said. “I just want to get to a truck stop and get a ride to Chevali.”
“What’s in Chevali?” Josh asked. “What kind of job?”
Argonne sighed. “Target,” he said. “I stock the clothing sections and work the floor.”
“Oh, you live there?” Josh leaned forward when Argonne nodded. “You just seemed like you travel around a lot doing a bunch of different jobs.”
Ha, Argonne thought, but stayed quiet, and Josh went on. “We visited Chevali once. It’s really warm. Do you even grow a winter coat?”
It seemed like a lot longer than an hour out to the truck stop, but Argonne was at least grateful to the raccoons for taking his mind off of Miski. The mom didn’t join in much of conversation, but did noticeably relax, and by the time they got to Silver Hills, she even drove out of her way to take him to a truck stop.
“Call when you get to Chevali,” she said. “Some of those truck drivers are rapists, you know.”
Argonne raised his phone. “I will,” he promised, though he h
ad no intention of doing so. “Thanks for the ride.”
In the truck stop, he was on more familiar ground. Here there was an unwritten contract, and he’d navigated it many times. Hitching in a city, you never knew who was going to stop and pick you up, but at a truck stop? These guys mostly just wanted company on the road. Not for free, of course; you could pay in “gas, grass, or ass.”
So he leaned against the outer wall (a couple paper towels between his paws and the spiderweb-crusted brick) near the corner of the little building, where all the truckers walked on their way back to their trucks. He pulled out his sea-foam scarf and wrapped it around his neck, then pulled his pride necklace out and let it show over his chest.
Problem was, only about half the guys walking by were going to be interested, and there weren’t that many guys to begin with. Sometimes he could be picky if he chose the right time, but he didn’t have that option now. So he gave everyone the eye as he went by. When the overweight hare scratching himself walked up, Argonne tried to meet his eye, all the while thinking, Please no, please no.
The hare went on by. And fortune smiled on him, because the guy who did stop when Argonne caught his eye was a red wolf, about his height, well-groomed, wearing a flannel shirt hanging open over a t-shirt. The t-shirt had no writing or images on it, but showed a little extra padding underneath. Argonne preferred tight muscle, obviously, but the red wolf smelled good, and after all, they weren’t going to cuddle up or anything.
“Where you headed?” the wolf said.
“Chevali.” Argonne held the wolf’s brown eyes with his and curved his lips into the hint of a smile. “I can’t pay for gas, and I don’t smoke.”
The red wolf flicked an ear. “Got any ID on ya?”
“I’m nineteen.” Argonne pulled out his state ID and let the guy inspect it. Most truckers wouldn’t ask, but he understood the guy’s caution.
“Wall then.” The wolf’s Cajun drawl came out more strongly. “I c’n get you far as Cactus Point, but I’m headed north after that. Plenty guys goin’ to Chevali from there, though.”
Two blow jobs was one fewer than it’d taken him to get out to Crystal City. “Love to keep you company,” Argonne said, and pushed off from the filthy wall.
“You c’n call me Scruffy,” the wolf said, opening up a large forest green truck adorned with stickers: “My Pack Goes 70,” “Marie Laveau’s Voodoo,” “Café Le Monde,” “New Kestle Fire Department.” Not a surprise, given his accent.
The cab smelled of Scruffy, mostly, but also mint; it took Argonne a moment to spot the circular tin of Mint Chew in the center console. Caffeinated mint leaves weren’t uncommon among canid truckers, in his experience. He pulled his door closed as Scruffy climbed in the other side. “I’m Argonne,” the fox said.
“Pleasure.” The red wolf didn’t start the truck, just leaned back in the seat and turned his reddish-brown muzzle toward Argonne. His eyes gleamed with the reflection of the streetlights in the parking lot. “So you wanna take care of this now?”
“Don’t pay the ferryman ’til he gets you to the other side,” Argonne said lightly.
“Heh.” Scruffy reached forward and turned the key. The great truck’s engine rumbled to life, shaking the cab. “Sound like m’older brother. He loved that song.”
“I didn’t know it was a song ’til a couple years ago.” The fox relaxed back against the seat. He didn’t even have to fold his ears back against the clatter of the big diesel engine anymore. The driver, he was sure, was far more used to it, but keeping your ears up when the engine revved was a sign that you’d been in trucks and knew your shit.
Scruffy guided the truck out of the lot and to the highway. “There’s a rest stop about ten miles outside Cactus Point. We can stop there.”
It wasn’t a question. Argonne nodded. “Sounds fair. Sorry, I blew a guy in the parking lot a couple years back and then he kicked me out of his truck. Said he didn’t want ‘no faggot smearing AIDS on his seat.’”
“Charmin’. Probably wouldn’t have enjoyed riding with him anyway.” Scruffy relaxed, back, shifted, and the truck’s engine ground and protested, then dropped into a higher gear. “Sounds like he was happy ’nuff to have a faggot’s mouth on his dick, though.”
“Sure was. And I wasn’t even as good then as I am now.” Argonne let his muzzle relax into a grin.
“Well, this cab already smells like faggot, so you got nothin’ to worry about.”
“That so?” Normally, Argonne would have welcomed the news that his ride was as gay as he was. Tonight that sent him back down the spiral of thinking about Miski. What had he expected? That Miski was going to dump that boyfriend and start dating him? The other girls he followed the team with carried around with them, like a trinket in their designer handbags, the hope that one of the one-night-stands would scoop them up, lavish money and gifts on them, maybe even marry them. These days marriage wasn’t necessary, though; they’d happily be a kept mistress.
Argonne wasn’t dumb enough to imagine that for himself. For one thing, until a few months ago, exactly zero guys in the league were out and gay. For another, or maybe another side of the same thing, it would ruin a guy’s career if he was found to be buying shit for a gay guy. Just the fact that Closet Smith had regular meetings with him was a sign of how desperate that fucking asshole was, and that was about the best Argonne could’ve hoped for.
He realized that Scruffy had said something and was waiting for his response. “Sorry, what?”
“This gon’ be a short trip if you don’ participate in the conversation.”
“Sorry, sorry. It’s been a long weekend.” He focused his attention on the red wolf. “What’d you say?”
“Just said I don’t suspect Chevali’s much more friendly to us faggots than New Kestle is. Then I asked how long you been riding the roads. Then I said, ‘hey.’”
“Chevali’s okay. Some parts. Better the last couple months.” But he didn’t want to delve into why. “Yeah, I’ve been following the Firebirds for a couple years now. Don’t have a license or a car.”
“Couple years, huh?” The red wolf looked sideways at him. “License said you’re nineteen now.”
“I’m precocious.”
“Zat so?” Scruffy grinned. “You blow one o’your classmates in fifth grade?”
Argonne raised his eyebrows. “We doing the confessional road trip?”
The wolf tapped the steering wheel. “Zach Elluria, muskrat. We were messin’ around with my dad’s booze and I asked him to take his pants off. Put my mouth on his dick but he didn’t come, ’course. Said it felt good, though.”
Argonne exhaled. What the hell, he wasn’t ever gonna see this guy again. He could tell him an Uncle Geoff story. “So fifth grade you were, what, eleven?”
“Twelve.”
“I was ten. Uncle Geoff.” He stared at the highway in front of them. “Caught me looking at gay porn on my computer. Asked if I wanted to learn to do the kinds of things they were doing there.”
“Shit.”
“Didn’t really wait for an answer.” Argonne shrugged. “After a couple times, y’know, I didn’t mind so much. I wanted to make him happy.”
“Does this end with you kickin’ his ass?” Scruffy’s voice got a growl to it. “Cause if not, I’d be happy to go do it for you.”
“Mom found out. Seemed to think it was my fault. So, y’know…I bummed around shelters for a while until I could legally work. Got a place with a few other guys now and I’m doing okay.” He’d told versions of this story to therapists at the shelter, to the other guys at the shelter, and sometimes, in his imagination, to the police. This was one of the simpler ones that didn’t require him to think too much about Uncle Geoff.
“Don’t care. You don’t do that to family.” The wolf smacked his paw on the steering wheel. “Especially not cubs.”
“My therapist says I should focus on healthy behaviors moving forward.”
“Heh.” The wolf relaxed back int
o his seat, eyes on the road. “This here seem like a healthy behavior to you?”
Argonne lifted an eyebrow. “You complaining?”
“Hey, no, not at all. Wouldn’ta picked you up just to complain at you. You don’t seem foux, but I just wanna make sure I ain’t addin’ pepper to the pot.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t picture him when I blow guys. I’m sure once I can afford a real therapist I’ll uncover all kinds of terrible damage he left me with, but I’m holding it together pretty well, all things considered. Only used to get twenty or thirty for a blow job around the shelter, so this is a lot better value. Financially, this is a very sound decision for me.”
“You’re all grown up now, I guess.” The red wolf snorted.
“What about you?” Argonne said, mostly because he was tired of talking about his own insipid life. “You just drive across the country and back again? How much are you home?”
“Home.” Scruffy paused on that word. “Mah first year in the life, I was havin’ a dinner with a couple other guys and I asked what they had waiting at home. They laughed. They told me if they wanted to be home, they wouldn’t be driving a truck. ‘One day,’ one of ‘em told me, ‘you’re gonna find a home you don’t wanna leave, and that’s the day you’ll hang up your keys.’ Never forgot that.”
“That’s the only reason to stop, huh?” The road before them stretched out straight and flat in the moonlight all the way to the horizon, unbroken pale sand dotted with low cacti and Joshua trees, and for all Argonne knew it kept going past the horizon, all the way to the end of the world.
“Nah.” The red wolf stared out with the fox. “Sometimes you just can’t no more, y’know? Just get tired of being on the move, and it’s not like you want to be home, but you don’t want to be on the road. We all believe there is a home, something at the end of this road. You never want to think you quit because you can’t hack it. You gotta believe you’ll hang it up because something better comes along.”
Argonne traced claws around the pads on his paw. “Something better, huh?”
