Coming Out on the Mountain

by P D Singer

  She’d been within earshot of the entire discussion. I interpreted her pat as “Get him, Jake.”

  Kurt’s face was bland. The sort of expression that normally presaged a wealth transfer from someone’s pocket to his. Probably wasn’t a bet on the game.

  “How did this come up in conversation?” Kurt was highly unlikely to lead with, “I shot Jake last summer. What interesting things have you done lately?”

  I was quite sure the whole family knew the story. It wasn’t a big secret, and Mom had flown out to Colorado to assist my convalescence. I’d received lots of get well messages from the family. Aunt Patrice’s card sounded sincere. I couldn’t recall if Uncle Ed had signed it.

  Uncle Ed sipped at the brown liquid sloshing around the ice cubes in his glass. “Things to be thankful for. He was thankful you didn’t die.”

  “I’m extremely thankful for that myself.” I could tolerate Uncle Ed for one long afternoon a year, I could, I could…

  “You never were a crybaby, don’t know why you’re starting now. It was just your shoulder, not a heart shot.”

  It was to Kurt, though. He still hadn’t completely forgiven himself for shooting me at all, however accidentally. He’d definitely picked the wrong relative to be open with about his thankfulness.

  Had Uncle Ed always been this much of an asshole? We’d always been grateful he’d been acquired by our aunt’s second, late in life marriage and not a blood relative to any of us. Even if we questioned Aunt Patrice’s taste. Well, maybe being married to him explained a lot of things.

  He was making me remember, thus making me queasy. Hope I’d recover before we sat down to eat: I was looking forward to the Thanksgiving feast.

  “You’re in the medical field, Jake. Explain to Uncle Ed here why a heart shot isn’t necessary to kill someone.” Kurt’s expression hadn’t changed. Just mildly interested. I mentally upped the stakes he’d propose by twenty bucks.

  “I don’t want to interrupt the game, Kurt.” The pleasure of lightening Ed’s pocket wouldn’t counteract disrupting everyone else’s good time.

  “Next commercial time, you have four minutes.” That was Theo, Ivy’s husband, and a whole lot of people clamored, “Yeah!” and “Better than deodorant commercials!”

  Maybe what they meant was “poke Ed in the snoot for us too.” A nicer thought than “entertain us with gore.”

  “Nah, he can’t.” Ed looked irritably into his glass, like it disappeared the whiskey without his permission or assistance.

  “I bet he can.” Kurt brought out the challenge. Those who kept tabs on the byplay, not just the game, and that was most everyone, chuckled or ooh’d. Even if Kurt’s words sounded like a casual challenge and not a live wager, I’d just seen the opening play in this game.

  I had to hope that hearing the technical details wouldn’t freak Kurt out too bad. Everyone else would have another one and a half quarters of a draggy football game to recover their appetites.

  I also had to wonder just what else Uncle Ed had said that pissed Kurt off bad enough to start one of his gambling capers before dinner. Because— “Twenty says you’re wrong about arrow wounds. Jake, tell him.”

  “Yeah, right.” Ed swirled the ice cubes in the glass. “Jake’s your buddy. I’d bet a hundred bucks he’d say anything to win your bet.”

  Is there a step down from “least favorite uncle?” Ed just achieved it.

  “Wow, Uncle Ed, way to assess my integrity.” If Kurt managed to take any money off him, I’d cheer. However, Ed was as cheap as he was stubborn. Not a good candidate for a bet bigger than who’d go pour the drinks, but the game was afoot.

  “Is your money still good if the assessment comes from anybody but Jake?” Ivy prodded. She peered around me at Ed.

  “Sure. Be the easiest money I ever took off a man.” Ed took another sip.

  “All righty then. A hundred bucks.” Kurt leaned back in his chair. “You’re on.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I had a pretty good idea of the next step in the dance, but it couldn’t come from me—I couldn’t deny my bias.

  But I really, really wanted Uncle Ed to eat his words, without salt.

  I hadn’t seen the member of the family most likely to serve up that portion.

  Ivy came to the rescue. “Okay then. Where’s Lucas?” she asked. “He’d be on your side if he was on anyone’s, but he likes facts.”

  Ed snorted. Guess he and his stepson had butted heads again recently.

  Lucas was also one of the people I was particularly looking forward to talking with. I’d been as charmed by him in my younger days as any of the niblings. And now I could approach him as a peer and professional.

  “I haven’t seen him yet.” Some faint crack! Crack! from downstairs suggested someone was playing air hockey, and Lucas often abandoned football for entertaining the niblings. Something about every tackle looking like an opportunity to either undo his handiwork or create the need for more. A few of the giants in hobnailed boots currently duking it out on screen were under his care. “Is he downstairs?”

  “I’ll find out.” Ivy jumped out of the easy chair and bustled through the kitchen, dodging aunts and hot dishes to bellow down the staircase, “Hey, Lucas! Come settle a bet for us!”

  She returned to her seat. “He’s coming in cold. You want a verified medical opinion, you won’t get any better than this. Kurt, Lucas is a physician’s assistant for an orthopedic practice.”

  “I’m willing to abide by it, and I don’t even know him.” Kurt kept his eyes on the TV, like the Lions might really score on this play. “But if you’re so sure you’re right, we don’t have to bet.”

  “You don’t get out of it that easily.” Ed waggled his fingers toward the kitchen. Aunt Patrice favored me with a sour look when she came over to replenish his glass. “I’m drinking the Bookers.” Back to Kurt. “I’ll take your money.”

  “Remember, you upped it to a hundred.” Kurt said. When you were questioning Jake’s veracity came through telepathically.

  “Whoo!” and “Yeah!” couldn’t have been for the bet. Oh. The Lions had scored. I cheered a little late. Yay, instant replay.

  “I’ll take your hundred then.” Uncle Ed smiled greasily.

  Thank goodness for family members like Becky, Cindy, Steve, pedantry and all, and Harry. The Eds of the world had people like them. Didn’t seem fair.

  Hey, one benefit of this “coming out to family” business might be never having to suffer through a dinner with Uncle Ed again.

  “Hi, Jake! Hi…” Lucas probably wrapped the air-hockey game with the niblings before he came upstairs. He was the uncle/cousin/favored adult of the under twelve set in this family for a reason. Never too busy, never distracted, often down on the floor, he might as well be the Pied Piper of the extended Landon clan.

  Guess I’d better up my game. Kurt would have a Lucas-sized following, but I might have to intervene if his draw to the munchkins was “how to throw a knife” or Archery 101. This was Bloomfield Hills, swanky suburb, not the Rockies.

  “This is my ranger partner, Kurt Carlson.” I liked my mom’s phrasing—it got partner in there to make Kurt smile, without getting more specific. Maybe next year…

  “Okay, what am I settling?” Lucas glanced at the TV where a multi-colored pile of giants writhed. “You know I can’t talk about my patients.”

  “Nothing like that.” Ivy seized control. “Just take a look at some scars, and tell us what you think.”

  “Whose and where?” Lucas looked around for his experimental subject.

  “Mine.” I undid the buttons on my waffle weave Henley shirt and pulled the neckline toward my armpit. With a mental apology to Kurt, I displayed the reminders of our misadventure. “Entry wound here.” I pointed at the shiny scar. “Exit wound looks the same, only back here.” I contorted to point at the approximate location on my back.

  Lucas pulled my shirt down enough to see exact
ly where. “Uh, huh.”

  “Chest tube went in here.” I could point at the spot between ribs with my right hand.

  “Uh huh. How much pneumothorax?” Lucas regarded me thoughtfully.

  “Thirty percent.” I hadn’t known enough at the time to understand how bad that was, but some of my classes since had a very personal application.

  “Raise your arm horizontal to the ground. Okay, now lift to vertical. To the front.”

  I performed his requested gyrations, grateful for all the physical therapy, but still not without a twinge where some nerve had met the arrowhead.

  “Wait, didn’t you get shot with an arrow last summer? I thought Aunt Beck was joking, like when you got run over by an elk,” Lucas asked. He and Alexis were enough older than Shari and I that we weren’t super close.

  “That happened too.” Though Kurt had the worst of the hooves. I buttoned my shirt back into style. I’d signed up to be stared at, but the end of the commercial break couldn’t come fast enough when everyone’s eyes were upon me like that. I didn’t want to explain who’d wielded the bow.

  “Well, damn, you were lucky.” Lucas nodded thoughtfully. “What was the question?”

  “Whether that wound was potentially fatal, without touching the heart,” Ivy summed up. “Kurt says yes, Ed says no.”

  She didn’t dignify him with the honorific. I was okay with that.

  “Ow. Lots of things about that wound could have killed him.” Lucas went into lecture mode, using me for an anatomy model. He ran his fingertips up my arm. “See, the brachial and cephalic veins come through here to join up to become the subclavian vein, which is a big honking blood vessel that ends up behind the clavicle but is real exposed right here—” He traced and pointed. “Perforate one of those, your chest fills with blood. Or pours out on the ground. Could have happened when the arrow went in, could happen when the arrow comes out. There’s some big arteries going the other way, so more opportunities to bleed out. Or, the pneumothorax, meaning a collapsed lung, puts pressure on the heart, possibly leading to cardiac arrest, as well as depressing breathing. It hurts, so you don’t, so there’s another couple of ways to die. With or without shock, which could also do it.”

  “Lungs don’t even go up that high,” Ed groused.

  “Oh yes, they do. Lungs come all the way up to here.” Lucas pointed below my collar bone. “So bad first aid, or delayed treatment could have gotten him, even if the initial wound didn’t. Jake, you are one fortunate man.” He grabbed my shoulder. “Have you thought of taking up some safer profession? Like, say, pharmacy?”

  “Where my biggest danger is from the guy who wants Oxycontin without a prescription, yeah.” I appreciated Lucas’s concern, and frankly thought I might be heading into more danger, professionally, than I’d had in the great outdoors.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that in front of Kurt, whose slightly glazed expression meant he’d retreated to his happy place while Lucas spelled out in detail how close he’d come to killing me. Well, he hadn’t, and I wasn’t going to let the mood linger.

  “So, about that bet. All those who bet with Kurt, raise your hands.” A forest of hands went up, including Gramps, a stranger, and most of the family. “Lucas says you’re right, folks.”

  We got some whooting for that, and thumbs up from Theo, my cousin Jasmine and her husband Victor. She was probably taking notes so she could tell the best “crazy relatives at Thanksgiving” stories to her friends. Maybe I should just tell her I was gay, and the Queen of the Gossip Mill would take care of notifying the rest of the family.

  Couldn’t think about that now.

  “All those who bet with Uncle Ed, raise your hands.” I looked around. Aunt Wanda had her hand up only as far as her chin, wiggling her fingers anemically, as if she hoped not to be noticed. She mouthed, “Sorry, dear,” and dropped her hand. “Okay then, we’ve learned some anatomy. Thanks, Lucas.”

  “What were the stakes?” Lucas asked, his attention on his stepfather, not me.

  “Nothing,” Ed grumbled.

  “A hundred bucks,” said Victor from across the room, tying Lucas’s position as new favorite cousin. “Pay up, Ed.”

  There might have been words in Ed’s growl, but the gist was “No.”

  “You made the bet, you lost. Pay up,” said Ivy, and a chorus of “Do it” and the like arose.

  Kurt said nothing. I said nothing.

  “No. It was a friendly bet.” Uncle Ed rewrote some history.

  “Didn’t sound so friendly when you were promising to take the young man’s money.” Our patriarch spoke up. Gramps had to be pleased that it wasn’t his offspring who’d brought Ed into the family. “You declared the stakes to be a hundred bucks. Twice. You don’t get to skip out on a bet you declared.”

  “I don’t take orders from—” got interrupted by the whip that was my mother’s voice.

  “Ed!” flicked out full volume from the kitchen. Mom had radar and could probably repeat back this entire conversation. “You were warned.”

  Ed had the grace to shut up. For now. I felt sorry for the folks who’d share the table with him, and didn’t plan to let either myself or Kurt be them.

  “Pay up, Ed.” Lucas fixed his full attention on the slouch with the cut glass tumbler.

  “Let him be,” Kurt said, a sunny smile on his face. “A man gets into the bourbon, his mouth starts writing checks his wallet can’t cash.”

  “I’m not drunk.” Ed smacked the glass down on the sandstone coaster hard enough to cut through the crowd roar from the TV.

  “In this house, you’d better not be.” Dad appeared from nowhere. “And you don’t renege on a bet.”

  “You set the stakes, you stand by your word.” Gramps added his weight to Dad’s.

  “Fat lot you know about keeping your wor—”

  “Ed!” Mom exploded into the TV room. “You were warned.” Lightning shot out of her eyes. “You have used up the last of your chances. Patrice, go get your coats. Ed here will settle up his wager, I will make up plates to go, and you both will eat where you can’t slop your ugly attitudes on the rest of us. I will not permit you to disrupt a happy family occasion.”

  Mom stared Uncle Ed down, forcing his hand by some telekinetic power into his trouser pocket. He extracted some bills to throw at Kurt. They fluttered to the carpet by his feet. “Here. Hope you choke.”

  He stomped out, Dad following. By some magnetic process, Lucas, Victor, Theo, Uncle Harry, and Uncle Steve followed like a solid wall. Gramps stayed seated, with a thoughtful gaze on the phalanx of protectors. Elliott, torn between the next play and being part of the Praetorian Guard, jumped up with one eye on the TV.

  Through the passway I could see Mom in the kitchen, extracting wrapped plates from the fridge. Either she could read the future or she was ready for anything.

  Not sure I was ready to see even the least pleasant members of the family kicked out, but Mom had made it clear there were simmering tensions, and that her tolerance was limited.

  “Young man, pick up your winnings,” Gramps suggested from the far set of leather chairs.

  “I’m sorry about causing a scene.” Kurt’s winnings usually ended up in the tuition fund. He captured the twenties to tuck away in his wallet.

  “I don’t think you should take Ed’s behavior on yourself,” Gramps said. “You may have been the proximate cause, but he wasn’t behaving much differently than usual, and I’m not at all surprised Diane invoked consequences. Long overdue.”

  Ed’s usual must have gotten worse in the last two years—I didn’t recall him making such explicit attacks. Anyone who provoked my mom to direct call-outs twice in quick succession certainly wasn’t using his best judgment.

  The aftermath carried from the front door.

  “I can’t believe you’d do this to your family,” sobbed Aunt Patrice.

  “I’ll say the same for you and Ed.” That was Mom. “You can g
o home and feel sorry for yourselves, or you can reflect on how you’ve behaved. I’ll put it into terms you can take to Bible class. Matthew 7:12.”

  “Ouch,” Kurt said. He flinched. “Remind me to stay on your Mom’s good side.”

  “Always a good idea.” After my earlier reminder, I was pretty sure Mom’s zinger was on the order of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

  The front door closed, and everyone returned to their seats. I, of course, plunked myself into the warm hollow left by Uncle Ed. Right next to Kurt, the best place ever. I might not be able, well, ready, to grab him for wild public victory smooches, but his foot against mine in a room full of people was almost as good as a hug.

  We cheered the Lions to their barely eked-out win. Miracles did happen sometimes.

  The wonderful scents from the kitchen intensified. Dad pulled the bird out of the oven to rest before carving. Too many people, including me, piled back into the kitchen to help carve the turkey and pile the long counter with stuffing, spinach souffle, mashed rutabaga, corn casserole and all the other traditional sides. The cranberries glowed jewel-red, slick with the last-minute splash of Cointreau. I’d made my mother’s recipe for our friends last year, and longed to taste it again.

  “Gather round!” Dad called, and all of us, from our greatest grandmother to the littlest of the niblings joined hand in hand in a lumpy circle that dodged chairs and couches.

  I held Kurt’s hand on one side and Aunt Becky’s on the other, while Dad spoke. “We are blessed to be together on this day, to share the love of our families and our friends…”

  I squeezed Kurt’s hand. I had to trust our blessings included my family’s love and support after I told them about us. Even if not—I still had Kurt.

  CHAPTER 6

  Kurt and I brought our loaded plates to the game table in the TV room to sit with Alexis and her husband Caleb, Ivy and Theo. Caleb fell all over himself talking about the antics of his unborn offspring, and positively gushed over Alexis.