Foothills Pride Stories, Volume 2

by Pat Henshaw

  But, hey, who was I to complain? He wanted camping? I could give him camping. Easy.

  Only one thing bothered me about the idea.

  “Look, Mitch, if we do this, you gotta promise me something. You gotta do everything I say when I say. No trying to talk me out of it or coming up with your own plan. The country’s not exactly like the city. It’s a lot more dangerous.”

  He grunted, then peeked over at me as we drove back to Stone Acres.

  “You think the city’s not dangerous? Think again. But, yeah, I get what you’re saying. I understand that I don’t have the experience to know what to do in outdoor situations. Not that I think we’ll get into trouble. So I promise I’ll listen and do everything you say. But you gotta promise you’ll do everything I say in the city.”

  I thought about that a minute before I answered.

  “Okay, but no kissing.”

  Again, he peeked over and laughed.

  “I can’t absolutely promise that, but how about this? I’ll try my best.”

  Seemed like we had a deal. I wasn’t sure I could sleep with Mitch in a tent in the woods, the two of us cozy in sleeping bags. But damn if I wasn’t on board to give it a shot.

  First, though, we had to get through a weekend in the city.

  Since I’d come to the conclusion that his kiss really hadn’t meant anything monumental, I was good. Like guys I know who high-five or bro-hug, I figured his kiss was just his way of saying he’d had a great time and thanks for sharing it with him. No biggie.

  Soon I’d be seeing him in his native habitat, like he’d seen me in mine. Cool. I could get past the unexpectedness of the kiss, and we could become friends.

  “How about if Rita and I drive you up, and you and I have dinner and then go to the clubs? If you don’t mind, you can spend the night at my place. What do you think?”

  “Yeah, okay. Sounds good. When?”

  “Friday after you get off work, Rita and I’ll pick you up.”

  It never occurred to me that he might be putting any moves on me. Why would he? He’d asked Con to visit him in the city too. He was a member of Abe and Con’s tribe, not mine.

  5

  ON FRIDAY after I got off work, he picked me up at home. I was waiting for him on the porch with my overnight bag. Mitch hadn’t seen my house before, so we wasted time as I gave him the short tour.

  Abe, Connor, and I had grown up in the house where I now lived alone. We’d been there with our mother until she split, then with our grandfather and dad. Grandpa passed within a few years. Then it was just the four of us, with the ghost of our youngest brother, Dominic, who’d died in a skiing accident.

  My brother Abe held us together with an iron hand, just as he did the construction business. Our dad was useless. So the house, until it fell to me, pretty much moldered away with nobody updating or fixing it.

  When I inherited it, I pulled out the kitchen and bathrooms. New everything. That took care of most of the germs and ugliness. But as I took Mitch on a tour, I realized just how shabby and threadbare it all was. I needed to get new carpets or pull out the existing ones and redo the hardwood floors. The curtains needed to go, along with the wallpaper. The house was begging for a remodel.

  “Damn. You live here. Really?”

  “Since I was born. All thirty-two years. Never anywhere else.”

  Mitch was staring at me like I was a museum exhibit.

  “What?” I looked around, taking in the run-down edges and mismatched colors and trying not to wince. “Why? What was your house like when you were growing up?”

  “Which one?”

  “You moved around a lot?”

  “Yeah, in a way.”

  “Why?”

  He looked toward the door, then back at me. “You ready to get on the road? I told Raven we’d be at the club by nine.”

  Not an answer. His childhood houses were shabbier than this and he’d moved around a lot? Or was he one of the silver-spoon mansion kids? If so, why’d he move around so much? From resort to city and back again? What did I actually know about Mitch? Not much, I realized. Not much at all.

  While the good-old-boy philosophy of life is pretty much live and let live, preferably with a beer in one hand, there comes a moment in every friendship when it’s time to knock down at least one wall and peek over the edge at your buddy’s personal life.

  That time had almost come for me and Mitch.

  WE DIDN’T talk much as we rode toward the city in the rush-hour traffic. Since I don’t drive along I-80 West very often, I spent most of the time looking out the window, a little surprised at how this corridor had changed. It had been a good five or six years since I’d gone into the city, so I hadn’t been expecting to see so many houses and shopping centers where fields and crops used to be.

  More than anything, though, I kicked around Mitch’s kiss and reassured myself that kissing was his way of high-fiving when he was exuberant. I could maybe live with that. As long as he didn’t ever do it to me again, but kept it for somebody like Connor instead.

  It’s true that I’m between girlfriends these days. And, sure, I’d probably dated just about everyone there was to date in the immediate area around Stone Acres. And, okay, maybe I wasn’t the sexed-up stud everybody believed I was, since I’d probably only kissed a third of the women I’d dated and had sex with four or five of those, and none of them without a rubber. While a lot of my friends had become accidental daddies over the years, it wasn’t going to happen to me.

  Hell, I’d only had one relationship of sorts, and that was with a girlfriend who was more a really good friend than a girlfriend or even lover. Shit, she lived in Marin County now and had a wife and two kids, neither of them mine.

  So, when you really looked at it, I turned out to be more of a social pretender than a Don Juan.

  “Hey, what are you thinking about?”

  Mitch’s question caught me off guard, and I almost answered truthfully. Fortunately, I glanced around and pulled back in time.

  “Nothing. Just how much everything’s changed these days.”

  After I said it, I realized I’d told the truth. I sure felt like the ground was moving under me, and the movement wasn’t the Big One, the quake that was going to turn Sacramento’s Pocket area into beachfront property.

  Mitch looked at me a time or two before he started talking again.

  “The first club I bought was in a neighborhood where I was living at the time with a group of guys. The other three guys told me that a lot of the downtown clubs’ customers were complaining about how they had to drive through a lot of traffic, then find parking because Muni was so unreliable. Getting back to their neighborhoods without being mugged or accosted was even more of a nightmare.”

  He shrugged.

  “So I looked around and found an end unit in a strip mall that I could afford and started a club there.” He paused. “Yeah, well, that’s where we’re going tonight.”

  WE ROLLED over the Bay Bridge and got into the city by nine, what with rush hour traffic, an accident, and one of those slowdowns for no reason. Rita purred through all of it like a champ. Not so much me and Mitch.

  “Get the fuck outta the way!” I yelled at one string of cars before we got to the bridge. You could see too damn much from Rita, and the amount of stupidity lined up in front of us hacked me off.

  “Well, that told ’em.” Mitch glanced over at me.

  “Fuck you!” I wasn’t having any of his tweaking. Fuck him.

  “And here I thought I was taking a grown-up to the city.”

  His snicker annoyed me.

  The line moved. Stopped. Moved. The guy ahead of us seemed to be texting. Move. Stop. Now he was picking at his damn ear. Grappling around in the front seat for something. Move. Stop.

  “Fuck it. I’m walking!” I was yelling again.

  Mitch gave me the old side-eye and smirked.

  Then we were all off like jackrabbits, changing lanes and accelerating like we were going
to run the range. Only our range consisted of three lanes leading to a tollbooth before we snuggled in close together to cross the bridge.

  Fortunately, Mitch had FasTrak, so we sailed through the toll area and picked up our cluster of stop-and-go friends to buttfuck our way across the water.

  “I’ve been trying to come up with how to introduce you to my clubs,” Mitch started as we stopped again.

  “So just bring me to them. What’s to introduce?” I groused.

  Mitch seemed to go out of his way sometimes to make things difficult. My mad was still firmly in place.

  He punched me in the arm, and it hurt like hell.

  “What? What did I do?”

  “Pay attention, like you’re always telling me.”

  I sulked.

  “I want to introduce them so I don’t have to explain myself and you’ll just get it. You know?”

  Stubbornly, I shook my head. I don’t pout often, but it was feeling good now. Making him work at this communication thing was strangely satisfying.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake! And who was Pete anyway?” His growl had a hint of humor in it.

  Fuck him. He started laughing outright. The sound tickled my soul, and I joined him.

  “Okay, now, good.” He ended on a laugh-sigh.

  Then he calmed, and I followed. We were in the middle of the worst traffic I’d ever seen in the city. Once again, I could see more than I wanted through Rita’s big picture windows.

  “So I figure I’ll take you to the clubs in the order I opened them. Then you can get a better feel for who I am.”

  “Sure. Whatever you say.” It sounded just as sassy as I meant it.

  He smirked.

  “Billie Jean, here we come.”

  Billie Jean? Like the moonwalk “Billie Jean”?

  “The first place I bought was in a family neighborhood where a couple of guys I knew grabbed a three-bedroom for cheap and remodeled it to flip. Only they loved it afterward. They couldn’t sell and had an open house. They were moaning about having to drive into the city to have a drink. I was looking to get into the bar business, so I bought the tumbledown eyesore in the nearby strip mall.”

  “You already told me.”

  “I didn’t know if you were listening.”

  He looked over at me as traffic stopped again. I thought we were going southwest, but we were way past any landmarks I recognized. When I met his glance, he nodded like he was checking to see if I was paying attention or just getting ready to give him needless shit. I snorted at the irony. How many times had he given me grief? Payback was fun.

  “Anyway, I named it for—”

  “The Michael Jackson song. I get it.” How dense did he think I was? Did I look like I only listened to Kenny Chesney and Willie Nelson?

  “Yeah.”

  We stopped for dinner at a little hole-in-the-wall Chinese place first, then were on our way to the first nightclub in the Mitch O’Shea empire.

  The neighborhood we turned into was relatively flat, like high-desert flat, only in the city.

  “This area is between the Sunset District and Lakeside,” Mitch said. “It’s mostly as middle-class as you get around here.”

  Yeah, well, it definitely didn’t look like anything I associated with San Francisco. The houses weren’t Painted Ladies or old money, just plain houses. But the streets, yards, and everything were very clean and neat. If you’d sent me a picture of it, I wouldn’t have said it was even in the Bay Area.

  After a few thousand stoplights, we drove up to a strip mall with a vape shop, a dead-looking dry cleaner, a brightly lit laundromat, and a nail salon. On the far end, buffered by a tiny H&R Block office, sat what looked like a modified diner with a rooftop sign that read Billie Jean in multicolor neon.

  The windows were blacked out on the top and bottom with the bar’s name lettered evenly on the black strips. The glass front door was blacked out too except for a clear circle near the top that had Billie Jean written across it.

  No loud music reverberated out of the place, so I figured the club was probably pretty low key.

  We’d gotten out of Rita, after having grabbed the last parking space in the mall’s tiny lot. I took a deep breath. Nothing to worry about. This was gonna be fun, right?

  I straightened my shoulders and walked to where Mitch was waiting for me.

  6

  BEFORE WE went inside, Mitch stopped me.

  “Look. I rarely go in the front door at this club, so I don’t know what to expect. I usually hit the office, talk to the manager, and maybe stick my head in to see the house.”

  He was looking expectantly at me, but I didn’t really understand why. Was he ashamed of me or something? Whatever the reason, I tried to reassure him anyway.

  “Hey, I get it, man. It’s not like we’re dating or anything.”

  Why did that feel like a lie? We’d been doing a lot of stuff together in Stone Acres during the last few months.

  He gave me a weird, almost disappointed look.

  “No, Ben, that’s not what I meant. I just meant that the staff might start making a big deal of me coming in like I was a customer. I don’t know. I wanted you to be prepared if they act weird, just in case.”

  “Everything’s cool, Mitch. Don’t worry about it. I’m just along to see your world, remember? You can tell me to back off anytime.”

  He looked like he wanted to say something else, but two people came out of the club and spied him.

  “Hey, Mitch! Glad we ran into you.”

  The blonde woman appeared to be so pregnant she might pop any second. Her companion—probably husband—strode toward Mitch like a lawyer or executive in training. They could have been living in Stone Acres and fit right in with any couple in their early to midtwenties whose kitchens and bathrooms Behr had remodeled.

  I left Mitch to talk to them while I went into the club.

  It too reminded me of Stone Acres and the basements we redid. The floor was covered with a wood veneer that would probably wear out in the next five years or so. But it fit in with the wood tables and chairs and the minimalist bar. A little raised platform in the corner was trying hard to be a cozy stage.

  People sitting at the tables looked paired up, while barflies and old guys held up the walls.

  The young guy strumming the guitar fought the room’s horrible acoustics. The steady hum of conversation about drowned him out. If I were Mitch, I’d get designer Fredi Zimmer, or somebody like him, to add fabric or something to soak up the peripheral sound and give the guitarist a chance at the audience hearing him.

  I walked in, and everyone stared at me for a moment like back in Stone Acres, where newcomers were assessed immediately. Here in Billie Jean, the regulars sized me up and wrote me off as harmless. They assured me I was free to blend in and have a quiet evening of drinking and listening to music.

  I ambled to the bar and scooted onto the only available stool.

  “What’ll you have?” the twentysomething bartender asked. Then he glanced over my head and straightened like a soldier on parade.

  I looked back and watched Mitch stride toward me as the music stopped and a desultory round of clapping came and went.

  “I see you found a spot,” Mitch said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “Yeah. What’re we drinking?”

  He looked behind me and nodded to the bartender as a couple of servers walked out of the back and hustled to the tables. “We’ll both have my usual. I’ve got a surprise for you at tomorrow night’s club. A couple of surprises, actually.”

  Then, like in any cliché Western when danger walked in the door, the bar got quiet. Even the guitar player stuttered a few notes. The two-beat silence ended with conversations resuming at an almost manic pitch and the guitar sounding stilted and mechanical.

  I turned. As I caught sight of the man in the doorway, Mitch slid in front of me, cutting off my view.

  “Glen.” Mitch’s voice sounded low and glacial, barely audible above the
babble. “What are you doing here?”

  “I heard you were going to be here,” a low, sexy voice purred.

  I peeked around Mitch, slipped off the stool, and stood beside him.

  The guy who smirked back at us appeared to be Mitch’s bookend. Where raven-haired Mitch was in a black suit, slick gray crewneck, and black boots, the blond with the greased-back hair wore a gray suit so light it could be mistaken for white, a ghostly pale turtleneck, and white-gray boots.

  I let out a laugh.

  “Hell, if I’d known there was a dress code, I would have come prepared,” I quipped. The guy was all disrespectful attitude, and I resented the way he was swaggering around Mitch, dammit.

  Mitch jumped slightly, his eyes gripping mine. Then he burst out laughing.

  “Oh shit,” the bartender whispered. “Why’d you say that?”

  The blond moved like a panther toward me, his hands fisted at his sides.

  I guess nobody had ever called him on his studied fakeness before. I resented how he seemed dressed to mock Mitch. Fortunately, Mitch wore his suit like it belonged on him and wasn’t a costume.

  “I’m Glen,” the guy announced, moving into my space.

  “Hiya, Glen. I’m Ben. Nice to meet ya.” I poured on the country because I knew it would annoy him. He was that type of city guy.

  “You replaced me with a country bumpkin, Mitch?”

  Since he wasn’t talking to me, even though he was facing my way and still staring at me, I didn’t answer. He wanted a stupid power play? No problem. Bring it on.

  “Glen”—Mitch’s voice held a world of warning—“don’t.”

  Glen thought I was a threat? Good thing I was here to explain where his real competition was.

  “Oh, you must be confusing me with my brother Connor,” I answered, now that I was catching on to how Glen wanted this conversation to go. Sure, you could cut the tension with a whip, but it wasn’t as bad as some confrontations I’d been involved in at Stonewall Saloon.