That’s why I can’t risk it. All my family share this view – I know my ma thinks it’s betraying Jesus Christ our lord and savior, and my brother states he once beat up a kid in high school because they were a faggot, no sweat.
For obvious reasons, I absolutely can’t be like that, or even entertain the suspicion I might be.
I have heard the word thrown over my head a few times. Mostly when I do less “manly” things, like my drawings, or reading romance books, or watching shows on Netflix like Outlander or Lost Girls, or the old school series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Instead of say, Die Hard, Taken, or A Bridge Too Far. Tough films. War films, action films.
Truthfully, I like watching romances develop, along with slices of humor. Films heavy on action bore me, because that’s all they are. Action, action, tough guy, more action, he won the girl, the end. Or they’re depressingly sad and wrought in violence as men waste their lives in hopeless wars, or we’re so unspeakably heroic that we saved the world. The reality isn’t like that at all. We’re not world savers. We’re cruel and invasive, and people are far too keen to forget their murky pasts and pretend that they’re wonderful people and their ancestors were just lovely.
Tell that to the American Indians. Tell that to the women burned at the stake, the slaves brought into our country, beaten and whipped and killed. Tell that to those who died to mass shootings, serial killers and “defensive” shootings. We have one of the highest death rates of killing our own people in the world.
Still, I can’t exactly fault people for feeling that way, either. I think it’s perfectly natural that we all consider ourselves as some kind of hero, because sometimes, thinking the opposite is what hurts them the most.
I just find it hard myself to share the same vision as my family, to get excited over matters in our country, and I’m probably the only one who doesn’t have tiny American flags perched around my bedroom.
I sit by the stream for a while, taking off my boots and socks, allowing my bare feet to touch the running water. I’m in a simple cotton shirt and jeans – always a best friend for hard work, the long grasses, and the bugs that might be lurking inside them. I take out my sketchpad as the trickling water soothes me, and I touch pencil to paper, letting my hand lead the way. I don’t know what I’m going to be drawing, I’m just letting the shape make itself.
Eventually, the lines coalesce into a mountain, fanning outwards, forming a fence around the base, and a lone figure stands on the mountain, their arms on either side, making them look like a cross in the distance. When I draw in the fluffy clouds, a few are placed in a way that makes it look as if the lone human is standing on them, or perhaps being swallowed. Just as I’m adding the tones, I get the fright of my life when someone behind me says,
“Wow. Your drawing’s really improved over the years, hasn’t it?”
It takes every ounce of effort to not streak a line across the canvas, ruining the picture, and I turn to face the owner of the voice, heart hammering in shock. A sick, needle like feeling spikes my stomach, as I stare into the dark eyes of my cousin. He wears a wry smile, one eyebrow twitched up, his hands folded across his chest.
Immediately, my cheeks color redder. “W-what are you doing here?”
“Attending my dad’s wedding, little cuz. What do you think?”
“No!” I grit my teeth, trying not to look into his eyes. “Why are you here right now?”
“Oh, well. Can’t I wander the ranch premises anymore, now? We arrived, and I thought I’d take a little stroll, heading to the stream to maybe take a dip, as it’s a nice, warm day. Imagine my surprise when I see you here. Why, it’s been so long since I last saw you, cuz.”
Fuckity fuck. I don’t want this. I don’t want him to be there, right now, when it’s just the two of us, far enough away from the ranch so that no one will hear me yell. I mean, I could try punching through him, and I’m expected to if I want to get through with shit, but Richard has about triple the muscle mass of me. The only thing that’ll happen if I try to fight him is that I’ll end up in a bodybag. And I don’t carry around a gun, because I don’t trust myself to not utterly panic and shoot the wrong person by mistake. Though I could seriously shoot this guy now.
“Please go away. I don’t want to talk to you?”
At this, Richard’s expression takes on a hard sheen. “Really? You’re playing hard ball? You should know that won’t work. For a start, we’re good friends. Or we were. So people are gonna be suspicious if we’re not seen talking, right?”
I don’t care that he’s right. Anything but being forced to interact with him again. Having to stare into those piercing eyes, having to remember what his hands once did.
“Second, I know you’re a sensitive type. Want me to go around jabbering to our relatives that you tried it on with me, and that’s why your avoiding me now?”
Damn him and his manipulating. Damn him! I whirl on him furiously, dropping my sketch pad, hands clenching into fists. “Oh, fuck you. You do that, I’ll end you.”
He laughs at this, a soft, mocking one that grates my ears. He unfolds his arms and places one palm at the back of his sandy blonde covered scalp. “Big words from small fry. You and I both know I can knock the living daylight outta you. And it still won’t stop the rest from judging.”
“I can just tell them the truth,” I say desperately. “I can tell them you were the one who started it. You can’t get me that way.”
“Are you sure they’ll listen to you?” He steps in now, dangerous. Nothing like the person I was friends with just two years before. He is full of cold fury, sinister confidence, and I’m already crumbling before this. “Most people suspect you’re a faggot anyway, cos you’ve never shown an interest in girls. It was why you let me do that, wasn’t it? Why you pretended you didn’t know much about it at all. You knew, alright.”
“Stop it!” Desperate with fear and anger, I lunge at him with pencil in hand, fully intending to stab, but he grabs me and quickly twists me in an arm lock before I’ve registered what’s going on. I feel the shameful presence of tears, and I fight them back with a scowl and a shuddering breath. “Fuck you.”
“You are such a fucking tight ass, you know that? I could wedge a broom up there and it still wouldn’t be enough to let the message sink in. God.” I sense Richard shake his head, and he twists my arm an inch further. If I move or he moves, it’ll break. Clutched in those powerful muscles, there’s nothing I can do. “Remember. If you don’t attempt to talk to me and act like there’s nothing wrong, then it ain’t gonna end well with you. And you know it. So stop being a stubborn ass and realize this is the terms, and they’re damn fair.”
Fair? Richard has a very different concept of what’s fair than me. I don’t say anything, because if I set him off, it’s possible he’ll break my arm. And since it’s my drawing arm, I’ll be fucked for a few weeks. I grunt out a fine, and he releases me.
“See? That wasn’t so bad, was it? Now…” he strides away from me and picks up the canvas with the sketch, examining it with a critical eye. “You do have a thing for the line drawings, don’t you? I remember you used to do those doodles everywhere when we were kids. You also had a thing for drawing the stegosaurus and the rex, with his tiny chicken leg arms.”
I’m not in the mood to reminisce, or to share fond memories. I get off the ground, my jeans green with grass stains, and I swipe at the sketch pad. “Give that back.”
“Rude,” Richard says, holding it out my reach briefly – he’s a few inches taller than me, before dropping it on my head. He then gives me a wink and ambles off as if nothing whatsoever had just happened. I’m left trembling there with my pad, my knees weak, my heart pounding a hole in my chest.
I’m getting close to the idea of seriously hating my cousin now. I glare at my sketch work, hit by an urge to just tear the fucking thing up and toss it in the stream. I bite back the impulse, only because I know I’ll regret it, but it doesn’t leave me with a happy taste in my m
outh. Neither does the prospect of this entire holiday, the wedding, and being forced to talk to my cousin. God, if he asks me anything intimate in public, I won’t be able to answer it. I’ll just freeze up instead of instantly laughing it off, and though some people won’t notice, I bet you my bro will. I don’t know how loyal he is to me and if he’ll approach me first before running off to dad, but I’m not willing to bet my life on it.
I sigh and dip my feet in the stream again. It feels dull and cold now, making my feet feel like ice slabs. Maybe the loss of its refreshing countenance is everything to do with my mental state.
Fuck’s sake.
Let’s just hope I can survive this.
Chapter Three
Next morning, I’m asked to help round up some of the cattle who have separated from the main herd. They don’t need the help, but it’s more of a small family bonding thing, and I accept. My da, despite his beer gut, is an apt rider, though they saddle him up on the only shire house in our ranch, a huge, pinto beast made like a truck, with muscles upon muscles. Slightly less beastly is the name, William, but he’s a good old hoss all the same.
I saddle up on Claire, a pretty little black quarterback with white splotches on her skin, and two white hooves. My brother’s on some horse I didn’t catch the name of, the kind of white horse you keep seeing in the movies ridden by the hero because it stands out.
Claire responds superbly to my commands – I can tell she’s not as fast as the others, but she makes up for that with her attentive nature. I scowl when Richard is also among the riding party, but clear it off with a perfunctory greeting, forcing a thin smile to my lips so I can stick with his stupid blackmail and not have him blab to my family. I also can’t indict him at any point unless I want the same backlash on myself. It sucks to be stuck, but whatever. I’m here, and I have to make the most of it.
“Just like old times, eh?” Terrance gives me and Richard a wide grin, before adjusting his wide brim hat, staring up at the puffy cloud sky, the swathes of blue, and the mountains in the distance. “I never get tired of this myself.”
“You’re always welcome to work with us,” uncle Fred says. “We always got room for family members to come work. When am I gonna hear about you two tykes?” He directed this to me and Richard. “You two were always good with the animals – don’t think Midnight loved a little boy as much as he did you.” The reminder of my black horse with his white hooves makes me a little sad – though I’m less sad to know that Claire is a direct descendant of Midnight, and we’re getting on just fine. “Little Claire here can be your hoss if you come to work.”
“Trasher’s still around, isn’t he?” Richard asks, chugging alongside uncle Fred and my da, “I’ve not seen him in the main stables.”
“Trasher’s getting on, you know – we put him to pasture on the other side in a small farm. He’s happy.” My uncle rattles on about the horses they have now and the ones they had in the past, including talk about Bully the bull, and I shift out of attention for a moment.
I often feel lucky to have been brought up in such a beautiful place, away from the meticulous grind of the big city. I went to big cities a few times in my life, and I hated them. I hate the way the air smells in those places, so clogged up with smog and not as fresh as the breeze that ripples along the grass and the cold, crisp ice of air in my lungs as I climb the mountains. Truthfully, I wouldn’t mind working on the ranch, but I don’t think I can be here.
I think I’ll end up disappointing my family sooner or later, because there’s things I’d rather do than what they do. It doesn’t seem like much at first, but it adds up over time. Not watching the sports stops me from being able to have hours and hours discussing the teams. I try following some events so I’m not completely clueless, like “Oh, I heard uh, Red Sox won that last match, right…?” but for the most part, that’s my biggest contribution to a conversation. My friends at school mostly live in town. I’ve invited some of them around to the ranch, though I still shiver at the last friend I invited – a guy named George.
He has this camp way of talking which instantly got on the wrong side of my da and brother. I was only fourteen at the time, and I didn’t actually know at that time George was, well…
But my parents certainly did, and my brother’s three years older than me, and he did as well. George didn’t feel welcome, and when the visit ended, I ended up not talking to him any more in school. I remember being cornered by my da afterwards who had said, “Why the hell you friends with a faggot? I didn’t fucking raise you up like this!”
Only then did I actually realize that shit, George might actually be gay. There were signs, but I’d completely glossed over them. I might have been fourteen, but it’s very hard for a fourteen year old to have not been saturated in all the shit the world has to offer. After all, if we have access to the internet, we will know shit sooner or later. But for some reason, it never seemed to click in my head that George was gay. At fourteen – well, you could argue that’s young to be deciding such an orientation, but at the time, he was. So, rather than acknowledge I recognized those signs, I played the naïve kid and went, “What? What do you mean? He’s my friend?” And acted like I’d never heard the word gay before.
My da accepted it, hesitating a moment before breaking out in relief and hugging me, though my brother was suspicious at the time.
The incident is over now, obviously, but I suspect that suspicion has been the source of why my brother’s been casually needling me and making “jokes” about the gays.
Richard knows about this pressure, too, but he chose to put me in this stupid fucking situation.
To make matters worse at school, George himself spread some rumors about me being gay, as some kind of revenge for the choice I made to stop talking to him. Maybe he did actually like me at a point, and like a spurned lover, he chose instead to drag me to the ground with him. Most people didn’t take it seriously, but enough did to make my stay at school annoying, and some girls approached me to ask if it was true. Why, I don’t know. Because they wanted a gay best friend? Or because they wanted something to giggle about with their friends?
Either way, it helped destroy what little reputation I had by remaining under the radar and not doing stupid shit, so I focused a lot more on drawing. There’s people who will invite me out and consider slanging the word “You’re my buddy,” in a sentence, but they don’t mean it, since they’re rarely interested in hanging out with me at all, unless they have a group of other people they can also talk to.
So, I don’t think I can fit here. Maybe in another state, with a fresh start with new people. Once I get my degree sorted, I plan to go and teach art history, maybe find a job as a museum curator at some point. One of the additional courses we get to select at my degree is archaeology concerning ancient art artefacts which starts next year, with a possible exchange program to eastern Europe, going to areas like Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece to excavation sites.
“There’s the little bastards,” Fred declares, jabbing his finger in the distance, where six cattle are chilling out near the fence line, munching on grass. They prick their ears at our approach. We have lassos ready in case any try to dart away, and we split up into two groups, circling around the cattle and urging them to move their lazy asses. They comply, walking scrunched up between our four horses.
“Well, that was too easy,” my brother says, disappointed. He stretches, before flexing his impressive muscles, and my cousin does the same. I glance down at mine, and my slightly burning skin – there’s a red raw patch which I know I’ll need to treat soon, and flex my rather unimpressive set of biceps. I should ask around to do some heavy lifting to tone them up, I’m sure my uncle won’t object.
“I don’t get how we can be from the same ma and da and you look like some kinda scarecrow,” Terrance says, grinning as he flicks his blue eyes in my direction. “Musta leeched all the good genes.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Richard says, riding faster to amb
le beside Terrance for a moment. “You might have the muscles, but your baby brother’s got a lady killer’s face. Why, if he bulks up, he gonna smash all your women.”
I slow to make sure the cattle don’t get any bright ideas, and Fred nods at me. In the meanwhile, I’m also seething inwardly at Richard, because I feel like he’s deliberately overplaying this. My brother, of course, laughs raucously at this statement.
“You’re kidding, right? He’s so scared of girls that if one touched him, he’d scream and run away.”
“I’m not scared of them,” I say stiffly, feeling the need to defend myself, and gather what little pride I have left, “like I’ve told you a million times, but you’re too fucking stupid to listen, I’m not interested. I want to have a fucking career first before I start screwing around with girls, accidentally getting them pregnant and then being saddled with a lifetime of debt, wasted dreams and drunken rages because I didn’t do what I wanted to do in life.”
Richard whistles, but my brother lets out a scornful laugh. “You can get the best life being here, working without ever needing to worry ‘bout all the bullshit, with a good, strong woman at your side. Instead of your faggoty art shit.”
“Just because you can’t appreciate art, doesn’t mean I can’t find people who will. It’s important to know history like that.” Plus, art history is a hell of a lot nicer than normal history, because art involves the people who strive in their societies, creating visions that transcend an era. Some of them suffered for it, but their products live on today, showing us glimpses into the past.
“It’s pointless. You’re wasting family money for a degree we know you ain’t gonna do anything with anyway, cos you’ll come right back here and work anyway. Why bother?”
“It’s important. And it’s mine.” My hands clutch harder on the reins. “It’s my dream. Not one that’s been drilled into me. It’s mine.” I glare at my brother, who doesn’t give in. Richard clears his throat.
To Love A Hitman Page 10
