This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Outland
TOP SHELF
An imprint of Torquere Press Publishers
PO Box 2545
Round Rock, TX 78680
Copyright 2009 © by Kiernan Kelly
Cover illustration by Rose Lenoir
Published with permission
ISBN: 978-1-60370-695-7, 1-60370-695-X
www.torquerepress.com
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Torquere Press. Inc., PO Box 2545, Round Rock, TX 78680.
First Torquere Press Printing: April 2009
Printed in the USA
Dedication
This book is for my husband. He tolerates my odd hours, encourages me always, and most of all, believes in me even when I don’t believe in myself.
Hon, we are Hank and Beaver.
Prologue
Outland wasn't much to look at, for all that the name sounds proud and mighty. Used to be a stable (and, oh, the lame religious jokes that bubbled up like farts from a bulldog's ass over that bit of trivia), reborn as a bar.
Actually, I can't honestly call it anything as significant as a rebirth -- wasn't anything near as grand or glorious. All Hank and me did was sweep out the mess, throw a coat of paint over everything -- eggplant, he called it, even though it looked like plain ol' purple to me -- and plug in a second-hand jukebox. Busted up a few old crates and used the wood to build a bar, set a couple of tables here and there, hung a fan smack in the center of the ceiling, and stocked a couple of Frigidaires with bottles of Bud and Miller. We printed Outland in plain, block letters on an stray piece of wood, hung it outside next to the door, and figured we was in business.
We were, too.
Word spread faster than I ever would've thought possible. One day it was just him, me, our friend Fargo, and Hank's three-legged, near-blind hound dog, Leroy; and the next, the damn place was full to the rafters with strangers. Didn't know but a few of them; didn't know how they even found the place, being stuck up in the hills like it was over a rutted dirt road half overgrown with weeds. There were no sign markers, not even a fucking breadcrumb trail for them to follow.
They found it, though, and came in droves. Started with just a few good ol' boys grown up in and around Meridian, but before long all kinds of folks were showing up every Friday and Saturday -- queer and straight both. Nice group for the most part-friendly, good people.
A few drag queens came; Miss Amanda Allure and her friends "adopted" Outland as "their" place. At least, that's what they told Hank and me. They were the ones who built the stage out of cast-off lumber and brought in all that fancy electronic shit, lights and microphones and whatnot. Purt near gave our old generator a heart attack running it all, but me and Hank didn't mind. Lord! Sometimes you could hardly hear the music over the racket the genny was making! Truth be told, they put on a pretty damn fine show, dancing in sparkly dresses and feather boas, lip-syncing to music. They made tablecloths for our old beaten up card tables, too, rainbow-colored ones with gold fringe, and matching vests for me and Hank to wear when we tended the bar.
A friend of Fargo's, Skeeter, stopped in and near took a shit-fit when he saw the wires and whatnot the queens had plugged in here and there; lines crisscrossing the floor like thin black snakes. Skeeter was a bonafide electronics wizard. The boy knew his shit, I'll tell you. Went to school for it at the community college over in Twilla, got a fancy diploma to prove it, too.
First thing, he cleaned up the wires, made 'em all neat and pretty. Then he brought in a crapload of hardware and a skinny little laptop computer, and I'll be dipped in Hank's eggplant paint if he didn't have a genuine light show going for the girls in no time flat. Spotlights and colored lights flashing to the beat of the music and videos playing on a screen he hung up behind the stage. Told us we were going to need a bigger genny, and I told him he needed his head examined if he thought we were spending another red cent on the place.
Didn't have any employees -- couldn't afford none. Me and Hank did it all, with some help from Fargo, the queens, and Skeeter. We tended the bar, which really only involved digging into the Frigidaires for beer, and filling up bowls with dry roasted peanuts for the tables. No fancy mixed drinks with those teeny, paper umbrellas at Outland. No, sir! Good, old-fashioned beer n' peanuts was all that was on the menu. We swept up the floor, cleaned the tables, threw out the trash, and washed what few glasses we used.
After a little while, we began to put names to the faces who showed up every weekend -- Merle, Buster, Big Pete and Little Pete, Sally, Linda, Frankie, Carl, Dermot, Boone, and Shelby Joe were some of the regulars me and Hank got to know real well, but there were others, and new faces came in all the time. Truckers who'd pop in for a beer -- big, beefy guys who used to park their rigs down along the shoulder of the highway and hike up the dirt road to the bar. Men from the mill over in Twilla, still wearing their workpants and boots covered in sawdust, and other folk wearing suits and carrying briefcases without a single callous on their smooth, manicured hands. Didn't matter what they did for a living. When they walked in the doors of Outland there wasn't one better than the other -- they all got along just fine, clinking bottles and dancing on the scuffed wood floor.
We had a couple of fights, nothing major, just good ol' boys drinking a little too much and loving a little too hard. Mostly, they were just a few minutes of circling, some name-calling, and a little pushing and shoving. They were over almost before they started, and nobody ever drew so much as a drop of blood at Outland. Me and Hank would've beat 'em silly if they had.
More than one person who came to drink and dance at Outland told us they were happy we'd had the balls to open a gay bar, and hoped our stones were big enough to keep it open. Hank and me, we knew what they were saying. It's one of the reasons I had my doubts about opening the bar in the first place... well, before Hank went out and bought twelve gallons of eggplant paint. After that, it was pretty much a done deal.
See, Meridian is a real small town, only a half-spit bigger than a wide spot in the single, two-lane highway that passes through Haggerty County on its way to somewhere else. It's a pimple stuck right smack in the middle of the Bible Belt's ass, not even big enough to be a dot on a map. Folks here live in old, tired houses that seen their best days back before the First World War. Got us some even older homes, too, a few newer, and all of them scattered over acres of hardscrabble land. Other folk make do with trailers, mostly singles with a few doublewides thrown in here and there. Everywhere you look, you find hard-working folk who earn a living on hourly pay, people who know how to pinch a penny until it screams good and loud.
Most folk keep to their own selves, living in glass houses and having sense enough not to throw stones. Some are friendly, always smiling and ready to lend a hand to a man in trouble. Like anywhere else, we got us a handful that ain't so neighborly.
Hank has it all figured out. Says some folks don't have much in the way of charity, and a few of them have hate seeded in their hearts from birth, be it for the color of a man's skin or the choice of lovers he takes to his bed. Some lash out at what they don't understand or because they see something in others they hate in themselves.
I think ol' Hank has it right on the money.
These are the people I was worried about when Hank and me first talked about turning the old stable into a bar, the people who feel the need to hammer an
d squeeze everybody around them into the same tight bunghole they live in. The ones who feel it's their God-given right to strike out at everybody who don't look or believe or live the same way they do. They're like bullies in grade school, the ones who need to beat up everyone who looks different, talks or thinks different, or reminds them of something in themselves they'd rather forget.
Haggerty County's biggest bully was Reverend Jasper Bellows, pastor of the First Corners Church. Bellows didn't believe in live and let live. He didn't believe in the power of prayer, or in the Golden Rule, or in a kind and loving God. Bellows believed in only one thing -- that God hated gays. To be fair, he also believed that God hated liberals, the IRS, single moms, blacks, Yankees, cable television, and the followers of every religion but his; but mostly Bellows believed the hand-basket to Hell was reserved for the homosetshuls, as he called us. If a gay person also happened to be a member of one of the other categories on Bellows' short-list of the damned, well then... they got to cut to the head of the line to damnation.
Lord! That man could spew shit like a born-and-bred asshole. Said everything gone wrong in the history of the world was our fault, from wars and famines to the price of gasoline, inflation, and cancer. Said we had ourselves an agenda, as if we was all secret agents like that Maxwell Smart on the old TV show, wearing trench coats and talking into our shoe heels.
We'd all seen Bellows in action before. He and his congregation picketed somewhere every Sunday after worship, and a lot of times, he made the evening news. Personally, I think that's why he done it. He was the type of man who liked to see himself on the TV. One Sunday, he might be in front of the Planned Parenthood Chapter in Bixby because they handed out free condoms; the next, he might be in front of the Town Hall in Twilla because they'd allowed a local chapter of PFLAG to hold a meeting under its roof. They'd even gone on special field trips to picket the funeral of gay celebrities and politicians. Damn fool always had his hair pomaded; the part in his hair was sharp enough to give you a paper cut. You'd turn on the TV and there he'd be, his big ol' horse face leering at the cameras, barking his hate into the microphones.
Bellows and his congregation were just as busy on Friday and Saturday nights as on Sunday afternoons. On those days, they'd drive the forty miles to Horton's or the fifty-five miles to Jinx's, the only gay bars in a hundred-mile radius of Meridian, and write down the tag numbers of the cars parked in the lots. On the last Monday of the month, when the Righteous Messenger came out -- the two-page church rag printed up in the basement of the First Corners Church on cheap copy paper -- it would feature a list of those license plates on the front page, under the headline Sinners. Bellows and his flock would be up and out before sunrise that day, stuffing mailboxes countywide.
Those lists went on being printed for two years, until finally, somebody somewhere must have noticed a familiar plate number and burned Jinx's to the ground. Nobody was ever arrested for setting the fire. Personally, I don't think anybody looked too hard, neither.
Not six months later, Horton's was raided and the owners, Joe Horton and Billy Bob French, were locked up, charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, disrupting the peace, and resisting arrest. A big ol' wad of bullshit is what it was. Poor guys were just earning a living. Joe had high blood pressure, Billy Bob was near as blind as a bat, and neither one of them was heavier than a stick of penny candy. They couldn't have resisted a strong breeze, never mind the police.
They sat in the Haggerty County Jail for three months while their lawyer worked to get the charges dropped. In the meantime, the landlord put their stuff to the curb, their truck was stolen and driven into a nearby lake, and someone broke into Horton's and stripped it bare, right down to the light bulbs. After they got out, Joe and Billy Bob packed up what they had left and moved away, and I don't blame them one damn bit.
After Jinx's and Horton's closed up, Bellows held a big meeting in a tent behind his one-room, clapboard church. There were camera crews and newspaper reporters from as far away as New York and California, snapping pictures and shoving microphones in his face as he proudly told the world that Haggerty County was now homo-free. That's what he called it, homo-free, as if gay people were a disease like polio or smallpox that the county had caught and he cured. I guess he thought closing down the only two places we could gather and be ourselves was all it would take, that we'd all move away or spontaneously combust, or something.
Hank got a big-ass bee in his bonnet after hearing about the homo-free thing and seeing Bellows on the television in all his Bible-thumping, scripture quoting, bullshit-spewing, holier-than-thou glory. Hank said if he wanted to suck cock, why, he'd go right on doing it whether Bellows saw fit for him to or not, and he had a good mind to suck a great big, fat one right in the middle of the First Corners Church's petunia patch for all the world and Bellows to see.
Considering that, even when he'd been a young man, Hank was never flexible enough to suck his own dick, I figured the cock he had in mind was mine. While I always enjoyed a good blowjob just as well as the next guy, I wasn't so anxious to get one that I'd consider standing in the middle of the First Corners' flower garden with my drawers dropped to my ankles and my gee-gaws swinging in the wind.
That's why I suggested opening our own bar. I wasn't serious, not really, but damn if Hank didn't jump on it like a boll weevil on a cotton ball. The next thing I knew, I was up to my armpits in eggplant paint, and Outland was born.
Things were fine for the first six months. People came, drank, danced, and fooled around in the bushes behind the bar. I was always sweeping up old condoms and forgotten tubes of slick back there. Still and all, it was fine. No real fights, no trouble big enough to write home about -- just us being ourselves without having to worry if someone was watching or taking names.
Then word got out to the wrong ears. We should have expected it, I guess. Secrets never last too long, especially in a small town like Meridian. Eventually, they work themselves loose, no matter how tight you try to sit on them.
That's when the trouble started, and that's really where my story starts, too. I'm gonna tell it all, hang the laundry out on the line including the underwear, skid marks and all. Some of it's sweet, some bitter, but all of it's true.
Chapter One
"Beaver, did you and Hank hear what happened over to Horton's?" Fargo gasped as he burst in through the front door, the screen slamming shut behind him. The door needed new springs, but I hadn't gotten around to fixing it yet. It always seemed like I had a long list of things to do, and the screen door ranked at the bottom of it, right after plucking my nose hairs and returning the library book I borrowed back in 1972.
Fargo Green was young, no more than twenty at the time. His pa was in prison, sent there after he'd tried to rob an armored car when Fargo was just a dribble down his mama's leg. Guess his mama wasn't overly fond of Fargo's daddy, since she named Fargo after the company that sent his old man down the river.
Anyway, Fargo was tall and thin, more knees and elbows than anything else, and as gawky as a colt. He had pretty blue eyes, big and bright, and a shock of hair as yellow and soft as corn silk. Those big eyes and wavy blond hair made him look innocent, younger than his years, but he was a tried and true horndog if ever there was one. If the boy wasn't getting laid, he was talking about getting some. No matter what the topic of conversation was, Fargo would find a way to work sex into it.
Fargo also had a habit of touching himself when he got keyed up over something, and since it didn't take much to wind his clock, he tended to walk around with a boner most of the time. Made for some interesting visits, I'll tell you what.
That day, he was all excited over Joe Horton and Billy Bob French's arrest the night before. His eyes were even wider and brighter than usual, and I thought he'd actually pull one off in his pants if he rubbed himself any harder. Truthfully, at first I was more interested in watching his hand move over the bulge in his denim than I was in what he was saying. Squeeze. Rub. Squeeze. Prick to bal
ls and back again.
"Beaver! Did you hear what I said?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah, Fargo. Calm your skinny little ass down. What's all the fuss about now?"
Fargo rolled his eyes at me. "I done told you already! Joe and Billy Bob were arrested last night! Took 'em in and booked them on some kind of fucked up charges. Lewd and something-or-other, resisting arrest, and God knows what-all."
"Hey, Hank!" I called to the kitchen, where Hank was cutting up onions for a salad. I could hear the thunk thunk thunk of the knife hitting the chopping board. Stew was on the menu tonight, and it smelled mighty damn good, reminding me of how hungry I was. "Did you hear about this?"
Hank appeared in the doorway to the living room, wiping his hands on a threadbare kitchen towel. "I've been in here with you all day, fool. How could I hear about anything if you haven't heard, too? Fargo, stop playing with yourself."
"Seems Joe and Billy Bob went and got themselves arrested last night," I said. I noticed Fargo's hand left off his cock for about a heartbeat or two.
"Oh, Lord. Did they close down Horton's?"
"Hell, yes!" Fargo exclaimed. His hand strayed back to his dick, a-squeezing and a-stroking. "Put a big ol' padlock on the door, and yellow crime scene tape all around. I seen it myself this morning. Place looks like it was on an episode of Cops."
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