All Over Him

by Ronald L Donaghe

  The air was warmer than I had thought it might be at the lake, and without a breeze and the sun shining down on the rocks along the lake, there were actually a few sun bathers. So as soon as we got to the gay part of Hippie Hollow, the three of us stripped down. Lance was amazed that we could do that without fear, and he said in this we had something that San Francisco lacked “—or at least I’ve never heard about any nude beaches around there,” he added.

  In no time, it began to get colder as the afternoon gave way early to the coming sunset. So we dressed quickly and made our way back to the pickup. Lance and I held hands and Charlie walked on ahead of us, alone. He wouldn’t always be alone, of course. He was too good of a man not to meet someone. He had a good personality and, with his experiences of Lee under his belt, he was a little more calm about getting a boyfriend. Still, he cut a lonely figure ahead of us, looking back to say something now and then, and I felt a lump of pity for him in my chest. My friend, Charlie. I had once told him that if the guy he was in love with didn’t have a husband back in San Francisco, I was sure that this guy could fall in love with him. So, in a way, it would be difficult for me to finally say good-bye to him tomorrow or the next day. When I did say good-bye, I hoped I wouldn’t cry and spoil the moment.

  The sunlight flickered through the trees and, as we were coming back into Austin, off in the west the sun was going down in a blaze of real glory. A few popcorn clouds had risen on the western horizon, and they were burnished with gold and pink amid a deepening blue. But because this was the hill country, by the time we pulled up to Charlie’s dorm, the sun was down, and night was coming on quickly.

  So I stepped out on the driver’s side and went around to walk Charlie to the entrance to the dorm. “Be back in a second, honey,” I said to Lance, so he stayed in the pickup. I decided right then that this would be our time to say good-bye. There wasn’t really any reason to prolong it, and I needed to spend as much time with Uncle Sean, Hank, and the kid as I could before we went back out to Mama’s.

  So as we drew near the door, I put an arm around Charlie’s shoulder and we came to a stop.

  “I think I need the rest of the time here to get ready for the trip, Charlie. So I thought...we ought to say bye now.”

  “Oh. All right,” he said. He turned to look at me. He stuck out his hand. “I’m going to feel lost for a while without you here, Will. I hope you’ll miss me a little, as well, even though you’ve got Lance. You know?”

  I shook his hand. “I already do miss you. I hate saying good-bye to my friends. And you happen to be one of the best.”

  Then we hugged and I shut my eyes holding him, fighting the tears. When we broke away I looked him square in the eyes. “Do me a favor, Charlie, please?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Be true to yourself. Like I’ve told you a dozen times, be picky about your boyfriends. Don’t just settle.”

  He smiled. “Easy for you to say, Will. But I’ll give it a shot.”

  “I mean it, Charlie. You’re too solid for most of the guys we’ve met. And do me one more favor.”

  He looked amused and a little quizzical. “Shoot.”

  “Tell Renato that I won. I didn’t fall. But if I had, it would have been to you.”

  This time he looked like he was about to cry, and I hugged him, again, and gave him a quick kiss on his cheek.

  “Bye, Will,” he said, his voice husky. “You need to leave now, before I lose it.”

  * * *

  The last few days with Uncle Sean and Hank and, of course, the kid, went by in a whirlwind. I finished packing my stuff, and getting the U-Haul was the final act. So before I knew it, we were standing in the living room, and I was holding Hanky-Hank. He wasn’t crying anymore, but he was hanging onto my neck.

  “When I call, Hanky-Panky, I want to hear all about school and stuff, okay?”

  “I’ll tells you, Will,” he said, though I doubted he understood much about what school was going to mean. Hank had said he was going to get him into a pre-school in a couple of weeks, since his ex-wife would be leaving for Washington and it would be better than trying to find a baby sitter. With me gone, there would be gaps of time when he wouldn’t have someone at home. So we’d been talking up school to the kid for several days, mainly as a way to take his mind off my leaving. But he seemed less stressed, once he realized that I wouldn’t just disappear from his life.

  “I’ll talks to Lance, too,” Hanky-Hank said, getting down from my arms and giving Lance a hug.

  As with Trinket, Lance seemed genuinely taken with the kid, though kind of awkward at the same time. And knowing Lance’s background, I figured that children were rare in his life. Still, I noticed that there were tears in his eyes as he hugged the kid back.

  It was a wet leave-taking all right. Uncle Sean’s eyes glistened and so did Hank’s. And mine were wet, too. And even though Lance had spent very little time with either Hank or Uncle Sean over all, he was perhaps the most teary-eyed of all when we finally walked down the steps of the apartment building and got into the U-Haul. His car, freshly washed and cleaned was hitched to the back of the truck.

  Once we were in the U-haul and I had started the engine, I looked back at the building for a long, last look. I had been happy there in a way, but more important, Uncle Sean now had a husband who loved him. I knew they would make a go of it, and for that, I think my hopes for Uncle Sean and, yes, even my job of helping him to find someone was done.

  I was also leaving Mama and the girls in what had to be the best times of their lives, too. I hoped Mama and Ernie would get married if they wanted to. None of her children would object, I was sure. Someday soon, we would have to tell her that we hoped she would get married again. She deserved it.

  * * *

  So, here we are at a truck stop just outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Lance has just got up to go to the men’s room. Oddly enough, he’s wearing the same lavender, rolled-neck sweater I gave him in December of 1973, which he wore on our first trip out to ‘Frisco; but now it’s faded, and a couple of the truckers have eyed him as he passed by. Something about the way the waitress has been eyeing us, too, has told me that she’s seen our rings and has put two and two together.

  Inside, where my feelings live, my chest is warm with the thought of being with Lance every night for the rest of our lives and I’m excited about every step of the way on our journey through life, together.

  Did I mention that he’s beautiful?

  Epilog

  January 19, 2003

  “Yes. We did see Casey on our trip back,” Will said, answering my question about whether they had stopped in Hachita as they had planned when they left for San Francisco in January of 1975.

  He was smiling wistfully, as though remembering something sad, though tempered with the healing distance of time. I glanced at Lance, who was sitting next to Will across the table from Cliff and me. Will had his arm around the back of Lance’s chair, as though we were the only ones in the place. We were in La Posta restaurant in Old Mesilla, New Mexico, dining in what used to be the largest Butterfield Trail station between San Antonio, Texas, and San Diego, California. The entire complex of old adobe buildings was now a sprawling, sixty year-old restaurant—historic in its own right. Lance’s attention was on Will as he spoke, but he glanced at me and nodded.

  “He was living at home with his mother and younger brother,” Lance added. “I guess he didn’t have any place else to go. He didn’t seem interested in much, really.”

  Both their expressions revealed long-ago pain recalled, which is the best way I can describe it. But earlier when we had first been seated, they were laughing and jovial as the four of us got to know one another. When we sat down, people turned to look. They couldn’t help it. I was with three very striking men. Cliff, my husband, was wearing one of his dark, almost noir, silk shirts and a black casual jacket. Like Will, he was at least six-foot-three. Will was wearing far more dressy clothes than he had when we’d met in Novem
ber of 2001 in Lordsburg, New Mexico, just a little over a year ago. This time, he wasn’t wearing a cap, or even a hat, and his blond hair was stylishly cut short. He was again wearing a solid green shirt as he had the first time I met him and, over that, a kind of mid-calf camel hair duster, though far from a western cut. As he had promised, he and Lance had stopped in Las Cruces and let us know they were still interested in meeting with Cliff and me, so we arranged to meet for dinner at La Posta.

  Lance Surfett was dressed in more cosmopolitan casuals than any of us, though I figured Cliff would have a few observations about what constituted his “style,” since I had no idea what it was called. His hair was a bit longer than Will’s in a cut and style that fit him as an artist. Again, I can’t really explain what I mean by that, but it struck me that his was a much more casual life than Will’s, whom I knew to be a geologist for the government. Even Lance’s clothing fit my concept of what an artist might wear, which consisted of a collar-less jacket of a burgundy hue that changed colors when he turned in the light, a lavender pull-over knit shirt, again without a collar, and baggy, blue silk pants. I figured lavender must have been one of his favorite colors. Will had often said that Lance wore that color and, in the light of the lobby, where we met for dinner, I made a point to get a look at his violet eyes. I sucked in an involuntary breath, because they were violet, but of a lighter shade than I’d imagined from reading Will’s journals. Though the years had been kind to both of them, gray highlights shone in Lance’s hair, but what gray there might be in Will’s hair was lost in the blond sheen. Both men had a cosmopolitan air about them, too, or maybe even star quality. They drew attention to themselves without being conscious of it. Or if they were conscious of it, they had learned long ago to ignore it without being obvious.

  I’d done the best I could on short notice, which meant black twills, a gray silk shirt under a blue jacket. I never claimed to be fashion friendly, and I maintain that writers are allowed their eccentricities of dress and lack of such taste.

  Lance’s voice still had a rather soft, but unmistakable Cajun accent, as Will had described so often in his writing.

  “Did Casey finish high school?” I addressed Lance.

  “Yeah, he did, but we gathered it had been a very lonely time for him. At least he had the family farm to work, and people there still make a living at it.”

  “The sad thing is,” Will said, “Casey wasn’t all that happy to see us. He was polite enough, but we didn’t stay long, because he seemed uncomfortable.”

  “Did he think you were critical of him for killing his father and brother?”

  “Probably,” Will said, “though of course we weren’t.”

  “It was more than that,” Lance said. He sat up in his chair, took a sip of coffee, then settled back, this time in a way that revealed his constant physical closeness with Will, by leaning into Will’s shoulder. “I know it was the guilt of the abused, because I’ve been there. I often felt like killing my step-father, but at the same time, I felt guilty. I imagine that Casey felt something similar, though with more intensity. It had only been a couple of years since he’d shot them, and his mother was probably a constant reminder of what he’d done.”

  “You’d have thought she would be relieved and kind of sorry for Casey, wouldn’t you?”

  Lance smiled sadly again. “If she was anything like my own mother, she probably didn’t feel that she had a right to her feelings—or her freedom from Mr. Zumwalt.”

  Cliff was mostly quiet. He has always told me that he doesn’t feel he’s a very good conversationalist. But that’s far from the truth. Maybe he was as shy around these two people as I was. There were, in fact, a thousand questions I could have asked Will, information that wasn’t in his journals. With the third installment of his journals done and about ready to send off to the publisher, I had decided to take a break from them. Still, between the ending I had chosen for this third book and what could be the beginning of the fourth one, there was a long gap of time I didn’t think was adequately covered to include it in the next work. One such gap was the events of their trip back to San Francisco.

  “So you didn’t stay in Hachita very long? Did you go back out to the farm or visit with your sister and Kelsey?”

  They both brightened at this question.

  “We drove out to the old farm,” Will said, “but as I suspected, Old Man Hill had ranch hands living there, so we didn’t even get out of the U-Haul. It would have been nice for both of us to walk the land one more time. Still, when we got to the Snow Ranch, we had a great time. They don’t run cattle anymore, but Kelsey keeps horses. We took a couple of days to ride all over their ranch. In these last twenty-five years, they’ve come a long way with their resort. But back then, it was still a rundown ranch with few amenities, so it was a great change for me from Austin.”

  “And me from life in San Francisco,” Lance added.

  “Do you get out there very often?” Cliff asked. Beneath the table his hand rested on my thigh. He squeezed and I covered his hand with mine.

  “I’m able to visit with them more than Lance does,” Will said. “My work for the Department of the Interior takes me all over. But Lance has done some great paintings for the resort.”

  “Yeah, the kind you buy at the starving artist shows. Motel décor sort of stuff.”

  “Don’t believe that!” Will said, smiling.

  It must have been one of their own private jokes. Lance wasn’t self-deprecating in the way he talked about his work, except about the art he did for the resort.

  “No, it’s true,” Lance said. “May and Kelsey have done a great job with the rental cabins, but I always felt they needed to bring the outdoors into the rooms, so I painted about two dozen scenes of the ranch.” He turned to smile at Will. “It doesn’t take a whole lot of time to paint a cabin against a desert mountain, or a cow drinking from a windmill tank.”

  I’d been dying to ask about his Uncle Sean and the rest of the family, so when I did, Will surprised me by his willingness to divulge information that he hadn’t been too keen on a year before.

  “Uncle Sean and Hank still live in Austin,” he said. “Hank, Jr., is back east near his mother.”

  I didn’t read anything ominous in his face, but I had often wondered how “Hanky Hank” had grown up knowing his father was gay, so I asked.

  “Oh, no,” Will said, grinning. “He turned out to be just as lovable as he was when he was a kid. He’s married and has three children. He takes them to visit his two favorite fathers, and the children call Hank and Sean their grandfathers. I don’t think they know, yet, which one is their real grandfather. I don’t think it matters.”

  “Mom, of course, is getting on in years,” Lance put in after a moment of silence, “but she’s like some of the old ranchers back in Hachita. She’s tough and she often says she has no idea what she’ll eventually die of, since there isn’t a thing wrong with her.”

  “You mean her smoking hasn’t gotten to her?”

  Lance and Will both laughed. “Ernie got her to quit years ago,” Will said.

  We visited a little longer, but it was getting late, and I saw Will glancing at his watch, so we talked a little about putting the series on hold for a while.

  “I agree,” Will said. “Let’s let my readers absorb my early journals, and when you start up again, we can probably gloss over a lot that happened at the end of the 70’s.”

  “And we can forget completely about the Reagan Era,” Lance said.

  What he meant was the AIDS era, I thought, and I agreed. At a time when gay men were dying by the thousands, a relationship between two monogamous gay men, untouched by the epidemic, would seem out of touch, even though my cursory reading of Will’s journals written during that period showed that he was aware of the plague and that he had lost friends just like the rest of us had.

  Then Will leaned into the table, and I leaned forward. He smiled. “When you do pick up the series again, are you going to keep
the Big Chief tablet? I haven’t even seen one in thirty years.”

  I was seriously surprised, though I managed to smile. “I used to think the image was kind of a trademark for you. It certainly is a quick identifier of your journals. But in the next series, I think it should disappear.”

  “Yeah, well, I was wondering if it would be relevant in the later journals.”

  “I’ll think about it. After all, it’s your life.”

  Later, we paid the check then drifted out into the lobby, where the restaurant has a kind of trademark of its own, the parrots and cockatoos in floor-to-ceiling cages.

  La Posta is patronized by people from all over the world, and there’s a guest book in the lobby for people to sign. I have no idea what is done with the books once they’re filled. But when you’re waiting for a table, it’s interesting to read the names of the visitors and the places they come from. I had Will and Lance sign the guest book before they left. I noted with amusement that Lance did the writing and that he signed it Barnett-Surfett with both their first names. He signed it that way without hesitation, but what tickled me was that he merely wrote “Arizona” as where they were from.

  “At least we might give our readers a little thrill if they’re ever in here,” Lance said.

  “Those who wonder if we’re real or not, anyway, and not just figments of your imagination,” Will added, winking at me.

  We all laughed at that.

  About the Author

  Ronald L. Donaghe is the author of the fiction series “Common Threads in the Life,” which includes four novels: Common Sons, The Blind Season, The Salvation Mongers, and The Gathering. The fifth and final novel in the series, A Summer’s Change, will be published in 2009 and will conclude the series. He is also the author of a major new fantasy trilogy, entitled “The Twilight of the Gods.” Book I, Cinátis, has been published. The author can be reached by email at ron@rldbooks.com and looks forward to hearing from readers. http://www.rldbooks.com.