toward the door, staring at the top drawing in his new collection. Beau gently took hold of his elbow and steered him around the doorframe.
Feathers
In the morning Ben set out to explore the City. He soon found a parade. Swirling and swaying in time with the tangled melodies of guitars and trumpets, feather dancers came down the avenue. It was Carnival Weekend, and the grand parade had begun, as always, with the Male Feather Dancers. Great plumed headdresses, modeled on Aztec originals, topped the dancers. Feather cloaks splayed behind them, iridescent with all the colors the avian kingdom could supply. The dancers wore little else, except, for legalized modesty, abbreviated satin thongs that revealed as much as they hid. Spring had come, and the City celebrated.
It was all so wild and new to Ben, so newly come from the mountain hinterland, so newly come to be freely himself. He stood at the side of the street, almost quaking with lust, to watch the Feather Dancers pass. He yearned to belong to that golden brotherhood, yet doubted he’d ever have the courage to expose himself so utterly to the world.
The Lion Dancers followed the Feather Dancers. The rhythms changed from Latin to Oriental. The Lion Dancers fascinated Benjamin, as well, but in a vastly different way. He had not realized the world held so many slim, graceful men.
From across the street Len DeLys surveyed the crowd. He idly admired the dozen or so young men he saw. Several he vaguely recognized. One, he could tell from the heightened color of his cheeks, was probably seeing his first City parade. The flush of excitement and almost embarrassment was typical of newcomers to the City and its ways.
Len had helped organize the parade and the fair at its end. The fair counted most, to Len. He hoped the multitude of booths and food stalls would generate enough cash to help substantially the charities he and his friends had persuaded to sponsor the show. The Trash Can Brigade from the City’s Sanitation Department stopped their march and performed a ballet of sorts with a lot of clanging of their trashcans and lids. Len thought he felt the street shiver under his feet.
He glanced across the street again. The young newcomer had begun moving, following the Lion Dancers and the Feather Dancers. So, he preferred the young and graceful to the mature and muscular, Len mused. He smiled wryly. It was a cliché of City life that, at thirty, one’s love career was over. By thirty-five one should have moved to the suburbs, or at least the City’s outer neighborhoods. Len hadn’t. Once in while his tall, lean frame still drew glances on the Street. Suddenly bored by the Trash Can Brigade, Len began to parallel the young man’s walk following the dancers. Len told himself it was time to check on the fair. Besides, the young man intrigued him.
Ben bumped into a longhaired man, dressed in ragged jeans, torn sneakers, and a gray Tee a couple of sizes too large for him. “Wow! Some parade!” Ben said. “Sorry I bumped you.”
“Not a prob’,” the man answered. “New in town, guy?”
“Yes. I came in yesterday, on the bus.
“I thought so. Watch your feet, as well as the parade, man. Don’t want to bump some broad that’ll make pulp out of you.” The man crossed the street during a break in the parade. Len watched him cross, and stopped him on the other side.
“Who is that stud?” he asked
The longhaired man glanced over his shoulder. “New boy in town, he says.”
“I haven’t seen him before. I’ll have to watch for him.”
The man scanned Len toe to head and back to toe. “A bit young for you, Pops.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Len said, his eyes following Ben. “Maybe I’ll have to find out.” Len moved on, crossing the street to follow Ben.
Ben said to no one in particular, “I’d love to be part of that.”
“You can be, if you want to,” Len told him. “Sometimes you have to make the first move, ask for what you want, y’ know?”
Ben blushed. “Oh. Now I’m embarrassed. I shouldn’t talk out loud to myself.” Benjamin looked at the older man in front of him. His thought that the man was in good shape for somebody that age.
“Don’t sweat it. You’re new here, right?” Len responded.
“Yes, just got here last night.”
“From a long dry time in a place with no men you’d want to be with.”
Ben stared at Len in surprise. “That sums it up pretty well. How’d you know?”
“Like knows like.” He smiled at Ben. “Mingle with the crowds, say ‘Hello’ with your eyes. Won’t be long before some guy or another responds.”
Ben smiled back. “Thanks. I’ll try that. Things are real different here from things back home.”
“Different how?”
“Back home, I just got fired from my job because somebody saw me come out of the wrong bar.”
“Well, welcome to the City. Most folks here don’t mind what bar you come out of, or who went in with you.”
Ben moved along to follow the parade. “I can be happy with that,” Ben said over his shoulder. “See you later, maybe.”
Len muttered to himself, “You’re losing it, DeLys; you should have invited him for a drink, or coffee. You even forgot to ask his name.”
Len walked away, wondering what about this guy had caught his attention. He certainly wasn’t the only recent arrival to the City. Something wistful about him? They were all wistful. He was nice looking, but not an Adonis. One of the booth operators came up to Len with a problem, and he put the other man out of his mind.
Ben walked away from the parade route toward the fair grounds. He was so busy looking around him that he didn’t notice the trio standing on the sidewalk. One man was dressed in full southern fried chicken colonel regalia. The chicken colonel lifted his hat. His wig was attached to the hat. Without the hat and its gray fringe, the man was suddenly young and vulnerable looking. The second man was dressed in full hippy regalia. The third member of the trio was a red-haired short man in a formal business suit. The three shook hands and the colonel and the hippy walked away. The red-haired man looked around him, as if to get his bearings. That’s when Ben bumped into him.
The man dropped a portfolio of drawings he was holding. Ben, embarrassed, said, “Oh, excuse me. Let me get them for you.”
“No problem,” the man said as he hastily stooped to gather them up. “Just some drawings I bought.” Ben got a glimpse of one drawing. He was sure it showed a nude man with an erection. The short man hurried away. Ben started toward the fair again. A rotund man in a saffron robe girt with an emerald green tasseled cord and sandals handed him a leaflet. Ben deposited it in the next trashcan he saw.
The Fair Committee had set the booths along three alleys. At the Bay end the alleys were open, to allow the breeze to cool the fairgoers. A large tent stood to the left as one faced the Bay. It made the dressing rooms for the parade participants. Benjamin found the tent just as the last of the Feather Dancers disappeared inside. He was too shy to try entering, even though the entrance was unguarded. Not even sure why he had followed the dancers, he watched the Lion Dancers enter the mysterious tent. He waited. Perhaps someone would come out.
Len came into the fair area just as one of the Feather Dancers, now in skin-tight jeans, T-shirt, and sandals came out. The look of longing on the young man’s face raised a choke in Len’s throat. Twenty years before he had been that young, that naïve. The stud in the jeans brushed right by the new kid, bent on the Thai Beef-on-a-Stick Booth. Several more dancers came out, chattering in a group. The young man looked longingly after them.
Benjamin began to wander through the alleys of the fair, stopping a while at a booth offering turquoise rings and bolos. Benjamin liked bolos. He selected a small silver piece set with green turquoises. When he heard the price, he shook his head, and left it at the booth. He’d learned quickly that things in the City cost more than they did in the mountain hinterland. He determined to be frugal. The fair was to close tomorrow. Perhaps he’d do better o
n prices if he came back just before the booths closed. It was only a short walk from his motel room. Ben turned up the street toward his motel.
Gilead’s Balm
Vanna Shayne fixed an expression of quiet pride on her face and gazed at Dickon as he came into the pulpit. He announced the scripture for the sermon was from Jeremiah and Corinthians. Vanna quit listening as soon as Dickon opened the great pulpit Bible and commenced reading. She did not lose her expression; she intended it to reassure the congregation how loving and supportive a pastor’s wife she was.
She masked her feelings well. She loathed Dickon. He had many faults. He was male. He was in charge. He was not ambitious. He paid more attention to God and the Church than he did to Vanna. He would not succumb to Vanna’s control.
Vanna did not wonder why she had married him, though she much regretted it. She knew precisely why. He was clergy, and, in the constricted world of Vanna’s upbringing, clergy were power brokers. Only after she married had she seen enough of the rest of the world to know that it honored most other professions with greater power and wealth. Dickon was worse than most clergy in the scramble for eminence. He had made it plain to Vanna that he had little interest in climbing the ladders of church prestige, and that he wasn’t interested in leaving the Church for other work.
Vanna let her fury build. This door had closed. She
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