Miles (24 page)

I
got pretty silly about the whole thing, bringing him a different gift each time
I came to that damned hospital, which embarrassed him to no end and was part of
the reason why I kept doing it.  I especially liked bringing in forbidden
food, like chocolates or pizza or bagels, because I'd always eat more than my
half and knew perfectly well the nurse would be able to smell the goodies in
the room after I left.

Our
conversations always remained light and cheery.  We talked about the end
of another remarkably undistinguished White Sox season, what we didn't do
together over the summer, going back to school, nonsense like that. 
Brennan was anxious to see the apartment in
Hyde Park
, to throw in
trying to get the place bribe-free inspection-proof, and couldn't wait to go
for a spin in the Bug.
 

We
spent one night going through the box of postcards Zane had brought me back
from
Scandinavia
.  An entire box!  They ranged from
glaciers in
Norway
and forests in
Sweden
to shots of naked
skiers, dirty goings-on in Finnish saunas, and mysterious, spy story kind of
frames of
Helsinki
,
Oslo
, and
Stockholm
.  We excitedly agreed to try and follow
Zane's footsteps the following summer, and to ask Zane to accompany us if we
did.     

On
another night, Brennan made me read him some of the poetry I had written in bad
Italian.  I read it badly, and Brennan understood it badly.  Just the
same, we almost cried together, afterwards.  That went badly, too.

*

August
wound on slowly.  I was glad Zane was back in town, since we talked on the
phone every night, and school was finally about to resume. 

One
night, in the middle of trying to write a poem about Brennan, I decided to call
up Ozzie.  It was a short and unfeeling conversation.

"I
don't know if they'll tell me anything.  They're afraid, you know."

Good,
I thought.  "Just find out for me, Kneecaps.  Do yourself a
favor and consider it my birthday present."

I
hung up and went back to my poem.

*

It
was the night before Brennan was to be released that we talked about something
more serious.

"Why
did you tell everyone about yourself?"

Brennan
shrugged, as if the whole affair was nothing.  "It's who I am. 
It's who we are."

"I
know that.  But does it matter if the world knows?"

"It's
not the world I told, just our friends."

I
tried not to laugh.  "Oh, yeah, friends.  Sure."

"They're
people we've played ball with, gotten drunk with, hell, we even went
skinny-dipping with them those couple of times!  Friends we've spent the
night with, at their place and ours." 

My
God, he even sounded like he believed what he was saying!  "Right,
such good friends they attacked you like animals, because they didn't like the
way you fuck."  Brennan was hurt.  I leaned over and kissed his
forehead.  I think a passing nurse saw me.  I wondered if she would
get a few orderlies to beat me up.  Let ‘em try, I thought.  I had Dad’s
old Beretta stuffed inside my belt, just over my crack.

I
tried to change the subject.  "By the way, Zane asked about
you."

"Really?" 
I nodded.  "That's cool.  He's a pretty nice guy, you
know?"

"If
his father didn't control so much of his life, he'd be even nicer."

"Do
you think he's cute?"

I
was surprised by Brennan's question.  I'm sure the surprise showed. 
"I never thought about it.  Now that you ask, well, yeah, I guess
so.  What about you?"

"It's
hard to forget all the noises he made doing it with that girl at your old
house.  Talk about a party.  What a turn-on!"  Hm! 
"Do you think he's...you know?"

"Queer?" 
Brennan winced.  He hated the word.  "No.  His father
wouldn't let him be, even if he was."

Brennan
gestured for me to sit next to him on his hospital bed.  "I don’t
hurt so much anymore.”

“It’s
the bagels and matzo ball soup.  Zora says they’re both medicinal.”

“But
physical hurt heals, eventually.  That's not the worst way you can hurt
someone.  What if you crush their spirit?  What do you think takes
longer to heal, an elbow or a person's heart?  Emotional and psychological
hurt are just as bad as someone kicking you in the head."

He
rubbed his cheek and shuddered.  Brennan's smile was feeble.  I
sighed.  I knew he was talking about Felix.

Brennan
took my hand and held it between his.  "What happened...happened. It
hurt a lot, sure.  I wouldn't want it to happen again, but, as hurt
goes..."  He shook his head.  "...it hurt a whole lot more
not being friends with you."

He
felt the flash in my hand and squeezed it.  "We never stopped being
friends, we just stopped talking.”  Ok, maybe not.  “We're friends
now, Brennan."

"I
want to be friends for longer than 'now'."

"I
don't think anybody will let us get married."

He
dismissed my witticism and stared hard at me.  "Will you promise me
something?"

My
eyes wavered.  "I'm not good at keeping promises.  You
know."

"Make
me one anyway."  I nodded with hesitation.  I think I knew what
was coming.  "I think strength is all about gentleness, in being able
to cry or to forgive someone, forgiving your own self especially."

"And
I don't?"

"No. 
You see strength like it's some kind of war you'd rather die fighting in than
lose.  To you, strength is any kind of scrap you can lay your hands on and
win.  Maybe that's why we love each other so much."  He made
himself blush.  "At least, that's why
I
love you so
much.  You're what I'm not, and what I can't be.  The same is true
for you."

"What
do you want me to promise, Brennan, to love you?"

"No. 
You've done...you do that."  We looked into each other's eyes as if
the rest our lives might be there.  The rest of the world didn’t
matter.  Time didn’t matter.  All seventeen years each had wound down
to that place that night, that room and that bed.  "I don't want you
to be a peacenik.  It’s not you.  But if anyone offers you peace,
then I want you to promise me, please, that you'll accept it.  Okay? 
Do you promise?"

Take
peace instead of making it, huh?  I wasn't sure why peace between me and
Felix was so important to Brennan, not having read The McGuffin Letter and
all.  But I made the promise anyway.  Maybe it would give Brennan
some kind of moral victory to help him heal faster.  "OK, OK, I
promise."

It
was an easy promise to make.  Felix has indefatigably sent me a birthday
card that had arrived a few days before.  He invited the two of us to
visit him and his family down in New Mexico.  I’d decided to make the trip
Brennan's Christmas present.

*

Brennan
didn't make me promise to forgive anyone else, however.

Evidently,
a number of local school board members received reports about grades being
adjusted and test keys being sold and distributed.  Much pressure was
brought to bear on the teachers alleged to be involved.  A bitter internal
inquiry followed, and a senior, little Eric Brazier, it so happens, was
implicated, and expelled.  Daddy Doctor Brazier even lost the school's
insurance account!  Why, the mess was so bad, it scotched Eric's chances
of getting into his dream school, the University of Illinois!

As
if that weren't enough to keep the old burg buzzing, a big downtown
modernization project being advanced by a local real estate investor just up
and collapsed.  The plan was scrapped and the properties rezoned, as were
a number of other holdings owned by this same investor.  The foreclosures
by a suddenly unfriendly local bank and the bankruptcy filing put a bit of a
crimp in the Sreckov's rickety family finances, not to mention putting quite
the torpedo in Mickey's college tuition fund, too.  The last I heard, the
Sreckov's even had to sell their house and "trade down" a few
suburbs.  Pity, that.

I
never thought I'd reopen the guest register from Mom and Dad's wake, but I'm
glad I did.  They had many excellent friends that weren’t blood relatives,
and it was good to talk to them again.

* * *

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath.  It is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

The Merchant of Venice

The
Land of Enchantment was exactly that.

On
the day after Christmas, at around four o'clock in the afternoon, we crossed
into what Brennan referred to as sovereign New Mexico territory.  You
couldn't buy a cloud in the deepest blue sky either of us had ever seen. 
The sun, which was beginning to set as we arrived, painted a small collection
of brilliant pictures athwart the vast and spectacular horizon.  The air
was crisp and clean, even when we stood beside the Welcome to New Mexico sign
on exhaust-filled Interstate 40, where we took pictures of each other.

I
looked up and down the highway before stepping closer to Brennan, who smiled
and wrapped his arms around me as I placed my lips on his for the fourth time
since we left Chicago late Christmas night.  We decided to commemorate
each new state by doing the perfect hug thing every time we crossed a border,
or ‘frontier’, as Brennan called them.  That meant no hugs or kisses until
we reached our next destination, which, to be frank, was difficult.

Originally,
we were going to do a lot more than hug and kiss at the "Welcome
to..." state signs, but neither of us wanted to be arrested by a
Deliveranceville sheriff or get run over; and the Bug, wonderfully eccentric
car though it was, simply wasn't much good for misbehavin’.

Besides,
I had told Brennan, if we were going to nakedly consummate our togetherness
upon each frontier crossing, the first place we'd head to was New England, not
the Southwest.

*

Even
though we talked endlessly, sang along to Brennan's glam rock and hair band
cassettes, and simply enjoyed a few of mine - nothing like a couple of crashing
overtures to keep you going through the night - it had been a long, exhausting
overnight drive, and we were content to spend the night in Tucumcari, the first
town we'd hit after crossing into New Mexico.

There
didn't seem to be much a town, per se, beyond the four or five mile strip of
motels, gas stations, fast-food outlets, and antique stores that were once part
of the fabled Route 66.  It was the town that time forgot, in a state, we
would soon discover, that was filled to the brim with such towns.

I
pulled into the last motel before the strip (and town) ended, a friendly enough
looking place that had its own restaurant and bar.  If you liked earth
tones, died, and went to heaven, your resting place would look a lot like our
hotel room did.  The grizzled old man in the black cowboy hat and
handlebar mustache grumbled an apology that all his rooms with double beds were
being redone.  After some shameless hemming and hawing, we took a room
with a king-size bed big enough for an orgy.

We
soaked the long drive out of our bodies in a bubble bath.  I had packed a
bottle of Mr. Bubble without Uncle Alex or Zora noticing.  I fell asleep
in Brennan's arms twice.

*

The
bar menu featured an item called Bucket of Beer.  Was this a literal
description, Brennan wondered?  A sweet old waitress named Sandy managed
to forget asking us for any i.d. before serving us both a wine bucket filled with
six bottles of Pacifico, a fine Mexican beer.  Maybe we looked like good
tippers (as opposed to under-age punks acting smart by ordering beer in the
first place).  The huge, stomach-busting delight of our dinner, which took
over two hours to consume, consisted of a taco salad, bar-b-que filet
quesadillas, chili rellenos, fried taco rolls, and the freshest, sweetest
tortilla chips we had ever tasted.  Then we sat and finished our beer
buckets for the next hour.

Even
though it was warm enough when we arrived in Tucumcari, the air was now almost
frosty as we walked through a massive empty field beside the motel, which
separated that end of town from the eerily deserted Interstate.  The only
thing we could hear was the whisper of the night breeze in our ears and the
sound of our feet on the dry, wild grass.  Above us, the moon was bright
and brilliant across in the still-cloudless sky, giving us both a shadow as we
walked beneath what looked to me like every star in the solar system.

Brennan
stopped and looked straight up.  "Could you imagine every night being
like this one?"

"Very
easily," I answered quietly.

"Do
you think it would get boring, like seeing the Eiffel Tower on the way to work
every day?"

"I'd
be willing to live in Paris for a year to find that out."

"This
is so beautiful."  Brennan pulled one of my hands out of my jeans
pocket and held it in his.  "But I won't thank you for bringing me
here."  He stuck his tongue out at me.

I
laughed.  "Why not?  You thank me for everything else."

"Because
I'd rather thank you for being here with me, here or any place else.  I'm
not sure how to thank you for giving me a Christmas gift like this trip,
though."

"Be
my love slave until the sun comes up," I replied with a grin.

Brennan
ignored my defensive humor.  "As long as you're with me, I'll be
happy.  It's the only gift I really wanted this year, anyway."

"I
never know how to respond when you say things like that."

"That's
why I say them."

We
concluded the night with Brennan giving me the massage of my life.  I did
most of the driving, so I got the rub-down, he said.  We took a quick
shower and started to fall asleep in a tangle of freshly-scrubbed flesh on that
helicopter pad of a bed.  Before he could say his usual 20 minutes worth
of good nights, I held his face in my fingertips and said, “I’m with you all
the time.  I’m with you even when I’m not.  I’m with you wherever you
go, no matter who else is there.”

Brennan
peeped through the dark like a Cupie Doll.  “How do you figure?”

“Because
you’re with
me
all the time, so it’s only right.”

*

Getting
an early start, we swept south and west through the middle of the state. 
After successfully avoiding the state police near Ruidoso, we took a short
detour through a tiny town called Cloudcroft.  A friend of Uncle Alex's
had sworn that the place looked like it belonged in the middle of Switzerland,
rather than New Mexico, so I thought we'd have a look.  He was
right.  The single, needle-thin road bisecting Cloudcroft wound like a
rubber band through hills that were blanketed with coniferous, snow-covered
trees and dotted with a few log cabins and A-frame houses.  The outside
temperature dropped to well below freezing for the few minutes it took to pass
through.  It was my kind of town.

We
stopped at the White Sands National Monument to enjoy a pot luck picnic
provided to us by a local 7-Eleven.  I long ago bought into Dad's aversion
to state and national ‘points of interest’, agreeing with his logic that, if
the place in question had a crowd of ill-dressed tourists anywhere near it, it
must not be all that special anymore.  But I honored Brennan's request to
at least have a look, and was glad I did.

I
drove to the end of the Monument's curling path, into the spectral landscape of
bleached sand dunes that the afternoon sun made dizzying to the eye.  We
wolfed down our sandwiches inside the car, took off our shoes and socks, and
trudged even further into the rolling labyrinth of white silicon hills. 
Once we were surrounded by these geological anomalies and unable to see or hear
anything else, we sat down on the sloping half of a sand formation.  It
looked like a huge, cresting wave about to envelop us.

"You
should have brought your notebook.  This is beyond cool, isn't
it?"  I nodded my head as I watched a pair of F-15s leave a vapor
trail behind them as they raced upward to altitude.  "It's a hell of
a beach!"

"Superb
beach," I agreed dryly, "but kind of bare coastline."  The
cool, powder-like sand felt like silk on my feet.  I opened my dull white
shirt, letting the sun keep my body warm.

Brennan
ran the flat of his hand over my chest before pulling off his sweatshirt and
moving closer to me.  "We haven't been in New Mexico for twenty four
hours, and I'm ready to stay here for the rest of my life."

I
took off Dad's old Navy-issue sunglasses and looked at Brennan.  "The
rest of your life is a long time."

"That's
not what I meant."  He bit his lip.  "I mean, for us."

"The
rest of
our
life together?"

"You're
already rewriting my sentences.  Some deal this is!"  He
laughed.  I didn't.  "Okay.  I'll shut up."

Something
was on Brennan's mind.  He didn't talk us to sleep the night before, like
he always did, and said very little during the day's journey.  It wasn't a
hostile or selfish quiet, but, rather, a thoughtful one that just hadn't
produced some epic exchange between us.  Yet.

*

“Take
off your clothes.”

“What?”

“You
heard me. Strip, right now.”

Brennan
stood up, wide-eyed.  He complied wordlessly.  The wind threw his

hair in every direction
while he met my gaze head-on.  The setting sun cast a warm orange glow
across his pastel body.  The moment stretched out until it sounded as if
we were inside of a sea shell.

“Don’t
I get to look at you, too?”

Neither
of us were hard (not fully, anyway) nor took a step closer, where

either of our hands might
reach for the other’s body.  We didn’t speak; it didn’t feel like we had
to.  We just looked and kept looking until we were shadows in the desert.

*

Morning
done broke.  For the first time in my life, jazz sounded good while the

sun was still up.

Uncle
Alex scored another box of 8-tracks for our road trip: John Coltrane, Dizzy
Gillespie, and Charlie Parker; Art Blakey, Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monk, and Stan
Getz, who I was especially excited to hear again; Billie Holiday, Dinah
Washington, Miles Davis, and a generous serving of Duke Ellington, the master.

And
boy, did the first tape we listened to sound great as we drove the Bug the way
its engineers likely didn’t intend, breaking a land-speed Beetle record on our
way through the splendid Black Range, in the southeastern corner of the Gila
National Wilderness.

It
was a good thing there wasn't much traffic on the Range's mountainous roads
that day.

*

We
came to a fork in the road.  If we turned right, we would head further
into the forbidding Gila.  If we turned left, we would straddle the
southern edge of the Wilderness until reaching Pinos Altos, an almost ancient
dot on the map that served as the "gateway" to the Gila, and home to
the Cromwell's humble ranch.

Brennan's
eyes had a funny look in them when he asked if we could see more of the Gila,
on our own.  I shrugged and drove in.  Felix had waited this long, I
mused.  Another hour or two would hardly change our lives, right?

Ho
ho ho.

We
stumbled upon a large shoulder off of a wide curve in the road that also
functioned as a scenic overlook.  We sat on the rounded hood of the Bug,
with our backs resting on the windshield.  A seemingly endless and snow-covered
valley lay below us.  Once again, good fortune smiled on us; we were left
without the interference of passing traffic, quite alone together on the cliff.

Every
place we had gone in New Mexico had some nearly chilling sense of silence about
it, and not just because the place was gigantic and didn't have very many
people in it, either.  No, there was something more to it than that. 
If the smart one wasn't well into sensory overload, he would have tried to
figure it out.  It took his greatest friend's tears to unlock the secret.

"Why
are you crying," I asked?

"I
don't know," he said, between sobs.

"Yes,
you do."  I put my arm around him and moved his body next to mine,
keeping my hand on the side of his hip.  Brennan tried to smile through
the tears that sounded like they had been building up for a while. 
"Tell me.  After all, you're the honest one, right?"

He
put an arm around my neck and pressed the side of our faces together. 
"I love you," he whispered.  The tears began to peter out.

I
kissed the top of his soft blond hair.  "I hope that's not why you're
crying."

"No." 
Brennan wiped the tear stains from his face with the sleeve of my old pea
coat.  "Now I understand what you used to say about crying.  I
feel like a dick."  He let out a long breath as he cuddled his face
against mine.  "You were right about something else."